“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 NLT)
The tentacles of unconfessed sin will squeeze the life out of your effectiveness as a child of God more quickly than anything else. We’ve got to realize that some sin needs to be confessed to more than God. One of Satan’s most effective weapons is lulling us into believing our sin isn’t that big of a deal.
Two things result when we fail to see our sin in its proper light: It weakens our link with God and with other believers. Sin is a huge issue! So gigantic that it could only be dealt with by the life, death, and resurrection of our Savior. Paul wrote in Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death…” Death is what we earn by ignoring our sin; it’s the cessation of the life God created us to have. What are the implications?
Sin separates us from a holy God, but it also separates us from our brothers and sisters in Christ. How so? Sin turns us inward because Satan’s goal is to keep us focused on ourselves. As long as our gaze is fixed on anything but Jesus, we’re dead in the water. Any hope of effectiveness for the Lord is lost, which basically translates: no effective witness to the lost and no effective growth in our walk with other believers.
Perhaps the most critical piece of this whole puzzle is prayer, and to harbor unconfessed sin is to put a strangle hold on our communication with the Lord. One of the key ministries of the Holy Spirit is to keep the lines of communication open between us and God, but sin clogs those airways. We can easily get frustrated, blaming God for not answering prayers that have no substance or that never reach Him because of unconfessed sin.
“Lord, bless me today” is like saying “Lord, help me get wet while I’m swimming.” God is all about blessing. If we tried to list all the ways God has and is blessing us, we’d run out of paper and ink before we ran out of blessings. Innocuous prayer is worse than no prayer.
Prayer should rattle the gates of hell, boldly expecting God to move in ways that threaten Satan’s hold, not only on us, but on those in our families, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and anyone else in our spheres of influence. Prayer is our lifeline to God apart from which we are hopeless and helpless.
Thom Rainer wrote: “We are powerless when we are prayerless.” Sin will rob us of the desire to pray more quickly than anything else, but it will also render the Word of God useless as well. How so? We can’t hear from God when the lines of communication between us and Him are blocked.
We’re so tempted to believe that sin has no hold on us once we’re saved, but if that’s the case why does the Bible so clearly direct us to seek forgiveness for sin after we proclaim our dependence on Jesus? To sin is our nature and even after the Lord gives us a new nature there is still a constant battle between what God wants in our life and what we want.
Every time our sinful nature “wins,” we lose – we lose ground in our walk with the Lord, we lose focus on our mission for the Lord, and we lose heart to do and be all we can do and be to the Lord’s honor and fame.
Powerlessness is a sin issue that can only be addressed through confession. Certainly, to the Lord, but often, depending on the nature of our sin, it demands confession to another person. “Secret” sin that we think is hidden from everyone and isn’t “hurting” anyone, is the deadliest of all, and must be confessed, not only to God, but someone else – a brother/sister who will walk with us on our healing journey.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 