Confess Your Sins To One Another - James 5:16 Series

James 5:14 Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the weary person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.

Introduction

The Body Heals the Body

After 10 years of faithful service, our refrigerator died last week. The only way to fix it would have been to replace the compressor. That’s how it is with most things that break down – you have to replace the broken parts. But a living body is different. The body heals itself. We could give our refrigerator 3 weeks of bed rest and it would still be just as broken as ever. But a week or so ago I cut my thumb, and now it’s just fine. When I got that cut, my body first sent platelets to that area to stop the bleeding, then white blood cells to kill germs, then fibroblast cells , which have the ability to form new skin and other damaged tissue. The body sends all those things to that area, and now - no more cut. You break a bone, and after a while it’s not broken anymore. The rest of the body comes to the rescue of that broken part and restores it to health.

The closing section of the book of James is about how to restore a broken church culture to good spiritual health. Throughout the book, James has been diagnosing all kinds of problems in the church, and now here at the end, he’s telling us how to restore what’s broken. But the solution isn’t to call an outside repair man to come and replace the broken members with better ones. We are more like a body than a machine. Scripture calls us the body of Christ, not the refrigerator of Christ. When something is wrong in the church, the solution James gives us is for all of the various parts of the body to bring healing to the sick parts. If you fall into sin, the whole body should move toward you – not away from you. We all come close, and all the platelets and white blood cells and all the rest come and fight against the infection of sin, destroy the germs, and restore what’s broken. At one time or another, each one of us will be the laceration or the broken bone in the body, and the rest of the body will have to come around and bring restoration. Your spiritual life is a community project.

Helping One Another Find Forgiveness

In fact, even forgiveness of your sins is a community project. Look at what happens to the guy who calls the elders to come pray in v.15:

James 5:15 If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.

How does that happen? He gets sick, the elders pray, and he ends up forgiven. “I thought your sins are only forgiven when you confess them and repent of them through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. How can the prayers of other people play a role?” We see something similar in Mark chapter 2, where the 4 guys couldn’t get their paralyzed friend to Jesus because of the crowd.

Mark 2:4 they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. 5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

Why doesn’t it say, “When Jesus saw that man’s faith, He forgave his sins”? Why the friends’ faith? Has all that stuff about confession and repentance been cancelled – all you need now is someone else to have faith for you? No, everything the Bible says about confession and repentance still stands. The sick guy in James 5:15, who is forgiven after the elders pray – that guy did confess his sins. It doesn’t mention that, but we can figure it out logically from the therefore in verse 16. Verse 15 says he will be forgiven, then verse 16 draws the conclusion: therefore confess your sins that you may be healed. The implication is that he also confessed his sins.

So where do the elders fit in? The sick guy did confess his sins, but evidently that didn’t happen until the elders came and prayed for him and anointed him and refreshed and encouraged him and exhorted him and did all they could to bring about spiritual restoration where it was needed. My guess is that the same thing happened with the paralytic in Mark 2. Maybe his faith was faltering and weak, and he was caught up in sin, but his friends’ faith was so strong and steadfast and resolute and insistent that by the time they managed to get him to Jesus, his faith was stimulated and fortified. Look at v.15 again. That phrase translated if he has sinned he will be forgiven is an interesting phrase. Literally it is: