Battling for each other

Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results. (James 5:16)

The power of confession is often untapped by Christians today. We have become a society that would rather 'cover-up' something than admit it, seek forgiveness for it, and learn to live above it in our lives. While I am definitely not a proponent of 'confessional type' practices where an individual goes to the man in the black suit to confess their sins, I am a strong proponent of sharing your struggles with a trusted believer. Why? It helps to create an undergirding of prayer and counsel in our lives. I believe this is what God wants for his church - followers who will take each other to the throne of grace and who will continue to undergird each other in prayer, wise counsel, and emotional support when our own is weak or lacking in some way.

Confession is uncomfortable to most of us. We struggle enough just being honest with ourselves and God. We often want to hide our sins because there is a certain amount of 'shame' we feel under the load of guilt they create in us. This is especially true of those 'life-dominating sins' that have become a habit that we cannot seem to break. The sin has a hold on us, and we find it hard to live apart from it. I think these are the type of things that God tells us we need each other to deal with. Isn't this the premise of support groups such as AA, OA, NA, Celebrate Recovery, and the like? The power of confession is the first step toward recovery. "Hello, my name is John, and I am an ________" is the most well-known statement of these groups, is it not? There is something that begins as we confess one to another. The undergirding of support begins.

Not every sin needs to be confessed to our faithful friends, though. It may just be that it is life's challenging sins that seem to have a hold on us that are confessed one to another. In doing so, we might just find a breakthrough that has eluded us prior to the confession of our sin and our need to be free of whatever it is that entangles us. We try to hold out as long as possible when life's dominating sins hold onto us, don't we? We think it will be too painful to admit we struggle with things like unholy habits, hurts that have brought a deep-seated root of bitterness into our lives, or addictions to things that ought not be part of a believer's life. We forget that God tells us confession starts a 'prayer cycle' on our behalf. It begins WARFARE on our behalf. What holds us bound has no chance when there are praying believers taking those things before God's throne! The power of confession is unleashed because God has put caring, trusted believers there to help hold us up before his throne until the bondage we have submitted our lives to is finally broken.  We need those warriors in our lives. Just sayin!