Confession: A Spiritual Tool

Today I want to talk about something that is a key part of our Christian walk, and indeed, I think a tool that we can use as Christians to understand ourselves better and to connect with our Creator in a way that maybe we aren't connecting. It's mentioned throughout the Bible, but like many tenets of commonly accepted Christianity, it's often misunderstood.

You hear about it in the local news all the time. Friends will share it. Late-night comedians often mock it. Lawyers, of course, are heavily involved in interpreting what it means. The police are involved. It can and does change people's lives. Most importantly, God expects it. We in the Church must understand how and to whom we should give it. Now, many of you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about confession. Most people, when they think about confession, at least I think about a Catholic priest in one of those little boxes.

Maybe there's a conversation going on between the great there and of course the famous, Father forgive me for I have sinned. If you're Catholic growing up, you maybe had that experience. Or if you've visited different churches in Europe or even here in the U.S., you might have seen those confession booths where the parishioner will go in and the priest will go in the booth next to him or her and there will be a confession that's had.

In the United States, here in the Protestant world where we tend to be more Protestant and mainstream Christianity, there was years ago a very public confession. If people remember when Jimmy Swaggart confessed to adultery on Sunday morning television, I think that was probably the highest rated religious show of all time. Really quite a spectacle where he quoted from Psalm 51. Or maybe you think about confession. Your mental image of confession is a cop show. You know how they get those guys there in the room and two detectives are working on the person, good cop, bad cop, and trying to get this guy to confess and be able to move the show along and so forth.

So there's different sort of mental images that we might have of the word confession when we think about confession. But today I hope I can clarify what the Bible really says about confession, what the word means, and a couple reasons why it's an important part of our spiritual toolkit. We're also going to look at some misconceptions.

Specifically, we're going to address this issue about why we don't confess to a priest or to a minister on some basis as the Catholic Church does. And also we're going to talk about confessing one to another and how that's part of this understanding of what confession means. And so when we finish, I hope we'll have a better understanding of what confession means and we'll be better prepared to use that tool when the time comes in our lives and when that's important.

So let's talk about what confession is and what it really means. Webster's dictionary defines confession as to tell or make known to admit as something wrong or damaging to oneself, typically. Another definition is to acknowledge sin to God or to a priest. And again, that's because of the Catholic process of confessing to a priest. But let's turn to Nehemiah 1 verse 6, and let's see the word translated confession in Scripture in the Old Testament. Nehemiah 1 verse 6 to 9. This is also, I think, a good place to begin understanding what confession looks like. This is a confession in Scripture. These scriptures here, we're going to read just a portion of this prayer.

In Nehemiah 1 verses 6 to 9, let's read what Nehemiah says as he confesses to God. Nehemiah 1, actually we'll start on verse 6. Please let your ear be attentive and your eyes open, that you may hear the prayer of your servant, which I pray before you now day and night for the children of Israel, your servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we, he includes himself, have sinned against you, but my father's house, both my father's house and I, have sinned.

We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, nor the ordinances which you commanded your servant Moses. Remember, I pray, the word that you commanded your servant Moses, saying, if you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations.

But if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though some of you were cast out to the farthest part of heaven, yet I will gather them from there and bring them to the place which I have chosen as a dwelling for my name. Nehemiah realized the gravity of the situation before them, and he confessed his sin. He confessed the nation's sin to God, and he asked forgiveness of God, that God would not forsake them, and yet he could be reconciled yet to God. It was a private discussion, but recorded here in Scripture. And the word confess that we saw in the Scripture is the same type of meeting that we have today, but there are some nuances to it, and that's why I want to share a little bit about what the Hebrew says. The Hebrew word for confess here is yada. That's Y-A-D-A-H. Y-A-D-A-H. Yada.

And literally, it means to use the hand or to hold out the hand like that. So something that's kind of moving away from you that way. Physically, it means to throw, as in to throw a stone or to start an arrow, to throw at or away from yourself. And again, I'm reading from Strongs, especially to revere or to worship with extended hands. So this is, you know, if you're saying, you know, perhaps you've kneeled down on your bed and you've got something before you want to share with God, and so you sort of hold that out, and you hold your hands out, and you say, God, I don't know what to do about this situation. That is an act here of moving away, your hands away from your body. And Strongs adds that it is to revere or to worship intensely, to bemoan. And again, when we bemoan, sometimes we wring our hands. Again, this kind of goes back to this action of hands moving outward. So, you know, sometimes you say, we're wringing our hands. I can't believe this is happening. You know, we tend to kind of do this with our hands. That's the literal sense of what this yada word means, that is translated, confess, here in verse 6. Let's just see an example of this used in Lamentations 3, verse 53.

Let's go over to Lamentations. We won't go through all of the examples, but I think this, again, begins to show that this word, confess, which comes from this word yada, is translated, confess, in the way that we might think about what we read in Jeremiah, but it can also mean to throw. So, Lamentations 3, verse 53, here says, they silenced my life in the pit, and they threw stones at me. And this word threw, or he's, you know, starting something this way, that is the same word, yada. It's the same word that's translated, confess, over in Jeremiah. It's quite a diverse word, and it really gives you this idea that you're intensely projecting something out from yourself. We won't take the time to turn there, but you can look in Jeremiah 50, verse 14, where Jeremiah talks about shooting an arrow.

And again, this action of shooting is the same word for confess. The sense of the word is not just to cast or to shoot away a bramon, but it also, again, it means to, you know, with intensity to worship.

Let's go to Psalm 28, verse 7, and let's see the word used there in the Psalms.

Psalm 28, and verse 7. And what we're, hopefully we're beginning to get a picture of, is that there's a whole body action, and we're going to see later when we talk about confession, that that confession involves action as well. Psalm 28, and verse 7.

The Lord is my strength and my shield, my heart trusted in him, and I am helped. Therefore, my heart greatly rejoices, and with my song I will praise him. The phrase, I will praise him, is the same word, yada. It's the same word. I will praise. I will confess. I will confess his greatness is basically the intention behind that word. You can also note down Psalm 30, verse 12, which is towards the end there in the next page, where it says, I will give thanks to you. And that, again, that is that word, yada. So it can be to praise, it can be to thank, it can be to throw, it can be to shoot, it can be to speak, as in saying that you have sinned.

All these have the sense of what it means of yada in the Old Testament.

Let's look in the New Testament here, and let's go to Matthew 10, verse 32.

There are just a lot of instances of the discussion of confession, so we couldn't possibly cover all of them. But again, we want to try and get the sense of what we do when we confess.

Matthew 10, verse 32 is an interesting verse because it shares something that speaks to God's greatness in terms of praising Him and thanking Him, but it also speaks to literally speaking of Him. It says, therefore, whoever confesses Me before men, Him I will also confess before my Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, Him I will also deny before my Father who is in heaven. And so to deny is to hold back, it's to impede, but to confess is to open up, to speak, to project outward. And this word here in Greek is homologisis, h-o-m-o, homo, and then l-o-g, lug, and then e-s-e-i, homologisis. And it's often translated in terms of speak the same word. So that's the intention of the Greek. Speak the same word or to agree. It can also mean to promise. So in this case, when we're confessing Jesus Christ before our colleagues and before those around us, our neighbors and so forth, what it means is that we are going to literally speak our agreement with Christ before others. We're going to speak that agreement. We're going to share our agreement, our connection to our elder brother before other people. We are going to confess. We're not going to say necessarily there's a crime involved. We're not going to confess our crime to our brother. We're going to confess our agreement. We're going to confess our praise. We're going to confess our thanks.

We're going to give thanks. We're going to give praise and share that praise.

Turn a few pages back in Matthew 3 verses 5 to 6.

Matthew 3 verses 5 to 6. We're going to see another Greek word for its translated confess.

And this gets back to where we started in Nehemiah, sort of the Greek equivalent to what we read there in the Hebrew a moment ago. This is speaking about how people came to be baptized by John the Baptist. It says here, we'll start in verse 5, then Jerusalem, all Judea and all the region around the Jordan went out to him, that is John the Baptist, and were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins. So this is that same sense. They would go to John the Baptist.

They would share something about themselves. And through that sharing, they would ask to be baptized. We don't know if they were always baptized immediately or if John told them to go back and think about it a little bit more and come back later. We don't have those kinds of details. But then we know that a great number of people were baptized in the Jordan. We know also that many of those people were later received the laying on of hands. They'd only been baptized through this method of John, but they were baptized. And that was a symbol of putting to death that old person who had committed those acts which were abominable, which they had confessed.

And that Greek word is exomologio. E-X-O-M-O-L-O-G-E-O. E-X-O-M-O-L-O-G-E-O. And it means to fully consent or agree to, to admit or to acknowledge. And that's typically what we think about with confession. We're acknowledging, we're admitting.

In the Greek of the time, according to Thayer's Greek lexicon, this was used to acknowledge a debt. I confess I have this debt. And so it was used in that sense. If you have a debt, you acknowledge that you owe something. And so it was used in that sense. So this confession then has a lot of meanings, but they're, they're, they're all centered around something that is projected outward with great force and, and, and passion, and in some cases to bemoan. And something that really admits something, whether it's praise or acknowledgement or agreement with, or, and again, something that is of, of, of significance that we've done that's not appropriate, or that is sin.

So then now that we understand a little bit more about what this is, let's talk about why we do this. Why do we confess? And like I said, I had two things that I wanted to share today about confession. The first one is that confession is part of repentance. It's part of repentance. Now, we know we have to, we have to repent when we come before God and we're considering baptism. We have to think about the things in our lives. We have to bring those to mind. And we have to acknowledge those sins that we've, that we've committed before God. But we understand that every year we examine ourselves as part of the passover, preparation for the passover. And in that process of self-examination, additional things may come out which we need to repent of. Repentance is not a once-a-year or a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It is a continual thing that we, we do. Let's look at John, 1 John 1, verse 8 to 9. And see this specifically described. 1 John 1, verse 8 to 9. It says here, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. When we have reached the point in our lives where we can see our capacity for deceit, we can see our capacity for sin. And often that's driven by self-preservation.

Often that self-preservation can be something as simple as our reputation.

Or it can be something as dramatic as our very lives, where we realize that to protect ourselves we will go to great lengths, even to sin and to hurt others. When we recognize that very capacity within ourselves, and we connect the dots on our human nature, that's when we begin to understand that our human nature comes from a source of evil and that on our own we cannot be a good person. We heard a very good example in the sermonette about people who are truly desiring to serve their brothers in what is a national crisis. We hear about homelessness as a national crisis, and here in California we are very much at the epicenter of that crisis in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, and in other cities. And it is great compassion that we heard about to provide for that. But no amount of helping people in those kinds of situations and trying to be a good person is going to allow us to be in God's kingdom.

We need God's Holy Spirit within us to reveal things about ourselves that we might be able to understand ourselves and then through that take tangible steps to make changes.

We ask for forgiveness and then to move forward. In 2017, Ken Burns released one of the most comprehensive documentaries ever produced on the Vietnam War. And in episode five, which is called This Is What We Do, former Marine and Vietnam veteran Carl Melantes describes one of the great lessons that he took away from the war. And I want to read this quote because I think it speaks to this connecting the dots on who we really are as human beings. And understanding who we really are and our capacity for evil and where that evil comes from, I think, is a critical part of understanding our need for repentance and our need to confess our sins. I'm going to read this quote now. He says, one of the things that I learned in the war is that we're not the top species on the planet because we're nice. We are a very aggressive species. It is in us. People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines. And I always argue that it's just finishing school. In other words, you don't really need the military to do this. This is just something in our nature. They just kind of finish it off with a few touches.

What we do with civilization is that we learn to inhibit and rope in those aggressive tendencies.

And we have to recognize them. I worry about a whole country that doesn't recognize them, because I think of how many times we get ourselves into scrapes as a nation because we're always, quote, the good guys. Sometimes I think if we thought we weren't always the good guys, we might actually get into less wars. I thought that was a very profound quote because he realizes that, hey, we're the good guys, so we have the right to do this. We can go ahead and do this. When actually if we realize, no, maybe we weren't the good guys, maybe we are maybe too full of ourselves, and maybe we're making judgments which aren't appropriate, we would get ourselves into fewer wars. I think if we bring this down to our own level, we begin to understand that if we aren't the good guys, and again, who wants to think of themselves as bad guys? None of us want to think of ourselves as bad guys or bad gals. But if we recognize that we actually have this inherent nature in ourselves, then maybe we would have less conflict among ourselves. We might realize that we are really just misjudging a situation. We are mischaracterizing a situation.

Maybe we aren't giving the benefit of the doubt to somebody that we really need to give to them.

Maybe we become emotional when we shouldn't. Maybe we are blinded by our backgrounds. Maybe we just don't realize the fact that we need to admit that we have sin. And when we come to that point where we've connected the dots on our very nature, that's when confession becomes a mechanism for repentance. Confession is a mechanism for repentance. Confession to God, in this case where we read here in 1 John 8 and 9. And in some cases, confession to our brothers and sisters as well.

Let's see an example of confession to others in the book of Acts, verse 19. Acts 19, verse 18 to 20.

Because confession takes the form of confessing our sins to God as we read, and then God being just to forgive us, confession also takes the form not in terms of asking for forgiveness from men of our sins, but asking for forgiveness of men because we've hurt them and we've done bad things to them. And we see that in the book of Acts, chapter 19, verse 18. Acts, chapter 19, verse 18 to 20. And the circumstances here is that Paul, being in Ephesus here, is preaching the gospel, and the gospel had been preached there. And people were convicted from this. They realized their sins. And it says in verse 18, and many who had believed came confessing and telling their deeds. And these deeds had to do with sorcery, the use of magic, the connection to the spirit world. And so they confessed their sins. And verse 19, it said, also many of those who had practiced magic brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all.

And they counted up the value of them, and it totaled 50,000 pieces of silver. And so the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed. And again, the context is that there were individuals that had done things contrary to God's law, and they had openly connected with evil spirits and practiced the magic. Now, the thing about this time here, and also frankly today, is that these folks that do this kind of stuff, you never really know if they're actually connecting into the spirit world, or if they're just really incredibly deceitful, and they're pretending to, and you can't figure it out. So you really don't know. And I think that was the case back then as well. So these people, not only were they connected into this world, but when they weren't, then they were practicing deceit. They were lying. They were taking money from people. And this happens today, too, right? People spend enormous amounts of money with people trying to connect to their dead relatives or trying to understand whether they should buy this business. This is a prevalent thing around the world. These people are called charlatans. They're deceitful people. So these people were confessing. I deceived this person. I took money from this person, pretending to have connected to the spirit world. And I didn't. And I robbed them. And I lied. And I subjected myself to the powers of the spirit world. And I did things that I shouldn't have done under that influence. They were confessing their sins, not for the purpose of having these people pronounce them good, but to acknowledge their sins. And when they confessed their sins, then they then moved forward with repentance. And they were able to put words to what they had done. And what we see here, and I think the important point to take away from verse 19, is that this confession of words, this outward confession, was followed up with tangible actions. It wasn't just lip service. They actually went and they got books and they burned these books on sorcery. Their actions followed their words. And I think we, as we think about confession, I think we have to think about actions following our words. What are the actions that we take? What is the follow-up letter, or the follow-up phone call, or the gift, or the act of service? Something that shows that. And not just at that moment, in the moment when perhaps we're feeling like we're capable of doing it, we have the courage, because sometimes this takes a lot of courage to actually do this, but later, that this wasn't just a moment in our time. This was actually a change in behavior. So this is a way that these people expressed their confession. Now let's turn to another principle of confession and repentance that we see in Psalm 51, verse 1 to 6, probably one of the definitive scriptures on confession. An example of a confession of sin. There's different types, again, of confession. This is a confession of sin. Psalm 51, verse 1 to 6, Psalm of David here, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba. David says, Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your loving kindness, according to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight, that you may be found just when you speak and blameless when you judge. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. Behold, you desire the truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part you will make me to know wisdom. And I encourage you to read the rest of this psalm tonight. It's a very moving psalm. I'm going to stop there just at verse six as we as we go through this. But as I said, here's an example of a very personal confession.

And there is an important point that we see, actually several. One of them is that he acknowledges in verse four that he has sinned against God. A lot of times we think about our sin in terms of what we've done against another person. Problem is, if we just think about what we've done against the other person, we tend to kind of get muddled into a little bit of a back and forth of, well, yes, I sinned against that person, but if that person had only not just done this to me, and then we tend to, you know, because whenever there's interpersonal dynamics, there's always issues on two sides. There's always something, even if it's very, very small on the other side. But we tend to kind of get into that. But if we step back from that person and say, is this how Jesus Christ would have wanted to be treated? Is this how God wants me to treat people? And we begin to take it away from all the connections we might have with that person, or that situation, or the circumstances of that situation, or the reasons why we maybe did it because of maybe issues that we dealt with in the past. And we recognize that we have sinned against God. The other thing that we see here in verse five is David's understanding that his sinful nature itself was the issue, and that he needed God's forgiveness for that. He says, in sin, you brought, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. This is actually a more complicated discussion, which we can maybe bring out in the sermon chat. We believe there's actually reasons to say that babies are not born necessarily in sin. There's more of a blank slate, but through time, almost immediately, they begin being exposed to the society around us. That's another discussion which might be an interesting discussion to have. But the point is here, he makes that his very nature itself is sinful, and that that nature then, as we develop and grow, begins to blossom, that human nature that we struggle with. So we see David acknowledging his sin. We see David understanding his sin and what that means. And despite all what we might do, we need to confess. We need to be able to pinpoint and be able to articulate what those things are. A lot of times we don't want to do that. We might go kind of at one level and say, well, we know we did this wrong. And we want to stop there because it's very painful to begin to explore that in depth and think about the hurt and think about the pain we might have caused.

But David did not stop at verse 6. He continued in verse 7 all the way to verse 19. It's quite an in-depth confession. And so by taking the time to really explore and to be in that discomfort of what we've done and really understand it and then confess it to God and ask for his forgiveness, is great power and great healing. And that is an aspect certainly of confession.

Now, I wouldn't want to just stop there because confession can also be very positive. And I wanted to make sure we saw one of those scriptures here before we went on to the next one. Confession, besides repentance and acknowledgement of sin and development of better human relations among our neighbors and so forth, can also mean to praise and to thank God, as we've said. And I want to look over in 1 Chronicles 16 verse 7 to see this. 1 Chronicles 16 verse 7, we see this word used because we can also worship and revere and confess God's greatness, God's power, God's might. We can confess our agreement to God as we saw there in Matthew. 1 Chronicles 16 verse 7 says, On that day David first delivered this psalm into the hand of Aesop and his brethren to confess the Lord, or yada, the Lord. To thank the Lord, it says in my Bible. So we confess when we thank God. We thank God. And this can make this can take many different forms.

Again, for sake of time, I won't go into those details here now. But if we think about when we bless our food, when we bless our food before we take our food, what do we do? We praise God. We thank God. We acknowledge his presence, his power, giving us the blessing of having that food, having the fellowship around that food. And that is a confession of sorts. That is a type of confession.

When we think about Jesus Christ as our high priest, and you can write down Hebrews 3 verse 1, it says that we consider the Apostle and high priest of our confession. Our faith itself is our confession. The way we walk, we were called the followers of the way in the beginning. The way that we walk is a confession of faith. And given then that our confession is about repentance and so forth, that our confession is about praise, our confession is about a way of life, the question then comes down to who do we confess to? Who do we confess to? Do we confess to a priest? Do we confess to a minister? Do we confess to our friends? Let's look over in John 20 verse 19 because I think there's an important theological point that we need to make sure we cover in this discussion because there is a reason that the Catholic Church practices confession the way they do. Those reasons are complex and have changed over time. But one of the scriptures that's used to justify this that we should make sure we're aware of is John 20 verse 19 to 23.

John 20 verse 19 to 23, it says, I'm in Acts. Let me get over to John. John 20. Here we go. Verse 19 to 23. Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week when the doors were shut or the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst of them and said to them, Peace be with you. And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side and the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. And then Jesus said to them, Peace to you, as to the Father has sent me, I also send you. And when he had said this, verse 22, he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained. So what does this mean? Does this mean then that Jesus Christ gave the disciples the ability to forgive sins? Can man have the power to forgive sins?

Well, the answer to that is that we believe no. That is not the case. And we're going to cover just a couple scriptures. You can just note Isaiah 43.25. We won't turn there. But it says, I even I, in he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins. So God is the one that forgives sins. But let's look over in Luke 5 verse 21. We'll see a little bit of controversy about this, but we'll see Jesus Christ reaffirming this position that God and only God can forgive sins. Luke 5 verse 21 to 24. Luke 5 verse 21 to 24. It says here, the scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone? The Pharisees knew the scriptures. They understood the scriptures. They understood that God and only God could forgive sins. In this case, Jesus had said to this this paralytic that his sins had been forgiven. But Jesus perceived their thoughts, and he answered and said to them, why are you reasoning in your hearts, which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven you or to say rise up and walk. But that you may know that the Son of God has power on earth to forgive sins. He said, the man who was paralyzed, I say to you, arise, take up your bed and go to your house. And then immediately the man will got up and he walked.

And so what he's showing here is that indeed he did not disagree with them on the fact that God and only God could forgive sins, but in fact he was revealing himself to be the Son of God, to have that power and not to be any ordinary man. And of course they were very upset about this.

And so we understand that that is how that is only God that can forgive sins.

So what could this mean then? Well, what the church understands is something in terms of church authority. Let's go over in 1 Corinthians 5 verse 1 to 5. What we believe is that Jesus here was talking about not a confessing of sins and then having those sins be forgiven by a priest, but what he was actually talking about here was the church's authority to make decisions about people being in church or not in church. 1 Corinthians 5 verse 1 to 5. It is actually reported that there is sexual morality among you and such sexual morality as is not even named among the Gentiles that a man has his father's wife. And so I think we know this story well, and it says in verse 5, it says, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh that his spirit may be saved in the day of the word Jesus. And so what Paul instructed them to do was to put this man out of the church. So the church has the authority to ask somebody to not be in church. Now this man obviously was in a state of sin, but I'm sure he was not happy about being asked to not be in church. But Paul had that authority and he told that these people to put him out of the church. Now let's see where Paul actually based upon repentance that he saw in this man, said that this man could come back to church. We go to 2 Corinthians 2 verse 5.

2 Corinthians 2 verse 5. And here we see that Paul uses language very similar to what was described back in John. 2 Corinthians 2 verse 5 out of 10. He says, But if anyone has caused grief, he has not grieved me, but all of you to some extent, not to be too severe. This punishment, and now he's talking about this man who had been put out of the church, this punishment which was inflicted by the majority is sufficient for such a man.

So that on the contrary, you ought rather to forgive and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one be swallowed up with too much sorrow. Therefore I urge you to reaffirm your love for him, for to this, and I also write, that I might put you to the test, whether you are obedient in all things. Verse 10. Now whom you forgive anything, I also forgive. And if indeed I have forgiven anything, I have forgiven that one of your sakes, given that one for your sakes in the presence of Christ. So what Paul is describing here is that he has forgiven this man, and that they should forgive him. His sins are forgiven by God, but his ability to come back to church is something that is something that he has that power to do, to ask somebody to not attend church, and ask somebody to come back to church. And so we understand that the scripture describes not a confession of sins and a forgiveness of sins. Only God can do that. But on the other hand, the fact that the church does have the power, as Christ said to the disciples, to forgive or to not to forgive. That is to say, well, this man or this woman does not have the right to be in church right now. They are still going to need to work on whatever issue they have, and so we are not going to grant that ability to come to church. So that is how we understand this verse. Again, we have a sermon chat afterwards, so we can go into that in some more detail. The church has the ability to exercise judgment as to whether or not a person should be allowed to remain in the fellowship given certain behavior.

Now, what about confessing our sins to people, to our friends? Let's look over in James 5, verse 1-6, and let's see that described. James 5, verses 16.

It says here, confess your trespasses to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.

That's in James 5, verse 16. So we don't confess our sins to each other so that we will be forgiven those sins. That's what we do before God. That's what we saw from 1 John. We saw David confessing his sins to God, asking for forgiveness. We understand from Isaiah and so forth that only God can forgive sins. We read in Luke that only God can forgive sins. But we see here that we confess our sins one to another, that we may pray for one another, and that we may be healed.

That's why we confess our sins one to another. That's what it says. Confess your trespasses to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. Today there are support groups and group therapy sessions that help people through difficult circumstances.

These groups have regular sessions where people come together and they tell their story and they confess what they've done. Maybe what they've done recently. And as they go through this process of sharing, they receive support and encouragement. People may pray for them later.

And there's healing that comes from that. That's what it says here. It says that you may be healed. Isn't that interesting? That we may be healed. We are healed through the process of confessing one to another. And I think it's interesting because if we understand that confession is about casting away, throwing away, shooting away, right? It's about something away from us. It's almost as if that sort of sin is being cast from us as we're doing that. It doesn't mean that we have the power to forgive those sins, but there's a healing that comes when we move those things away from us.

My wife and I know a man who was very, very ill for a long time and really struggled. And many thought that he would die. And at one point in his illness, he began to write down his feelings about some tragedy that had occurred in his life. And from that point forward, he began to recover.

He actually began to recover. The very act of releasing that anger, that resentment, that pain that was buried inside of him, whether to God or to a close friend, or in this case, just writing it down, had a very powerful healing ability. Many writers have commented on this part of our humanness. I remember reading years ago in Time Magazine an article that talked about this with one of the sailors who died on a Russian submarine. I don't know if you remember this years ago. It was August of 2000. There was a Russian nuclear submarine near the North Pole. And it sank, and all 118 crew perished on the submarine. And when they recovered the bodies of the crew, they found a letter in the pocket of one of the sailors. And this was a letter that he had written to his wife. He wrote a letter to his wife. In those last few cold hours in the fading light, this man chose to write a letter to his wife. And in the letter, he literally describes how all the lights went out. And he continued to write in the dark, even though he couldn't even see what he was writing. He was pitching darkness in a submarine. And you know what it is. If you've been in a cave where they turn off all the lights, you know that you can't see anything. And even in pitch darkness, he continued to write. And then at some point, he folded the letter, and he put it in his pocket. And he died. It is something that we do as human beings. We want to reach out to others. We want to connect with others. And what he wrote in that letter was something very deeply personal to his wife. The essayist in the Time article commented that this desire to communicate is profound evidence of our human connectedness through history, and is one example of the tremendous human need to share what is inside of us. If you've ever seen the old Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, people seen that movie, you know, there's this character called Wilson, right? The volleyball. And I think it's, you know, the movie could have actually been done better, but I think it is an interesting portrayal of the fact that this man stranded on this island all by himself desperately needed somebody to talk to. And so he painted a face on a volleyball, and he would talk to this volleyball. It's a very interesting way, the way we are, how we need to talk. We need to share what's inside of us. And again, this can get a little psychological, and that's not my point, but I think the scripture is clear. Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. There's a healing power that comes from that. It's not the forgiveness of sins, it's just the healing that comes.

Today, hopefully, I've helped disassociate confession from those stereotypes that you've had, whether it's the priest or the detectives in the room or Jimmy Swaggart.

I hope that we can think a little bit better about what confession means. I hope that you can use confession as a tool. We think about prayer, we think about study, we think about fasting.

I'd like us to think about confession. Confession to God of our sins, and that means repentance, that means examining ourselves, and also about who, and at the right time, we might confess things to our brothers and sisters, and how healing might come from that confession. Whether it's Jeremiah or Nehemiah or Paul or the early New Testament Church, confession, I think, is a vital part of repentance, of renewal, of praise, of thankfulness, of the way we walk in our Christian lives.

It's about worship, and it's about acknowledging our shortcomings.

And I hope that as we understand more about confession and what it means, I hope that we can really begin to understand who we are and how God can use us effectively as his servants.