Episode 76: Confessing Your Sins One to Another

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. I'm here with gray beard, Eddie Rex.

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I know, it's getting grayer and grayer. It's probably just because I haven't seen you in a month. That's right.

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Man, I'm so encouraged that the podcast is still rolling out, and we haven't been together.

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I hate that we haven't been together, but it's good to be back. We've both been traveling. Yeah. You've been to Texas, I've been to Kansas.

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Actually, you've been to a couple of different places. Didn't you guys also go on a trip to the conference with Dr.

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Baldwin? We went to KovCon, and that was great. I don't know when this podcast will be out, but I bet by the time the podcast is out, the sermons from KovCon will be out, so definitely

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I would say go listen to those. Sam Waldron, Joe Beeky, Vodie Bauckham, it was really good.

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Then I went to Texas. I preached a couple of messages there for my friend Randall Easter and his annual

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Easter week Bible conference, and so that was great. You've been going places.

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There was a death. We had a friend. Both of us had a friend who passed away, and I wasn't able to make it to that funeral, but you were a lot closer and you were able to do that.

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I actually had two funerals that day. That's right, so providential hindrances.

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But here we are today. Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. I am your co -host,

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Allen Nelson. I'm one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas, and with me is

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Gray Beard, Eddie Ragsdale, pastor of Marshall First Baptist Church in, as he says, beautiful Searcy County.

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That's right, beautiful Searcy County, Arkansas. It is like one of the top seven places, according to Outdoor Magazine, for viewing the eclipse, which, of course, by the time this comes out, the eclipse will be far in the past,

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I'm sure, but we are less than a week out from the big event, and like I was telling you just before we started recording,

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I have no idea what to expect. Some people think it's going to be horrible.

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Some people think it's going to be a great event. Like we've talked about in the past, we both are just desiring to share the gospel while there are people in our area maybe that aren't normally here.

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And so hoping that the Lord will use that for His glory. Yeah, amen, amen.

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I don't know what to say about that. I guess we'll probably record a podcast after everything's over. Tonight we have a prayer meeting, so I'm looking forward to that.

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You know, Eddie, we say this often. I haven't copyrighted this phrase, but it's something

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I say a lot, and it's something we should say. Christ is worthy of healthy churches.

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And one of the things about healthy churches is the one another's in Scripture.

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And so today you and I are jumping into James 5 .16. We have a lot to discuss regarding that.

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You've got it pulled up. You want to read it for us, James 5 .16? What are you reading in? ESV. Oh, I was afraid you had gone over to the

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LSB. The whole world has gone after it now. I'm reading it this year for my personal

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Bible reading. Hey, it's a good translation. All right, James 5 .16 in the standard version.

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Therefore, confess your sins to one another, pray for one another that you may be healed.

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The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

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So Paul here in this, or James. I said

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Paul. James here in this passage, I probably should have backed up a little bit, so I'm going to go ahead and do that.

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He starts in verse 13 by asking some questions. Is anyone among you suffering?

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Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is anyone sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the

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Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the

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Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another that you may be healed.

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The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. There's lots going on there,

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Ed, and too much for one episode. But here's one big picture thing I want to say as we just begin to approach this text.

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That is, a lot of people ask things like, well, what does it say in the Bible you have to go to church to be a Christian? Well, maybe you don't find a specific verse that says, thou shalt go to church, although you have some ones kind of close to that.

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But what I want to say is, brother, that you can't read this passage that you just read.

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You cannot read this passage without a framework lying behind the text of the local church.

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If you're just like this lone ranger Christian. So one of the first things I want to say about James 5 .16 is, you cannot fulfill these one another's apart from formal, covenantal, tangible, actual, real membership in a local church.

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Otherwise, because if you say confess your sins to one another, means that you're supposed to just confess your sins to every

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Christian you ever meet or every person you ever meet, then that's a completely different application.

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Like, we have to obey the Bible, don't we, Eddie? Right. And actually, you could do a lot of damage that way.

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If you think the place for you to confess your sins is to go online and write a blog or to put a post on Facebook or on whatever your favorite social media platform is, and you think the way that you're going to confess your sins is go on there and just dump out all of the wicked things that you, not only to you, but to other people, that could do a lot of damage.

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You know, it's a funny thing. It's a joke.

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But the old song that Ray Stevens came out with about the squirrel in the first self -righteous church, you know, the lady begins to just confess all of her sins under the—

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Sister Bertha, better than you. That's right, under the conviction of the squirrel in her garter.

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And that actually, it's kind of funny there because it's a joke, but she actually begins to confess things that, if you took that serious for just a moment, was wrecking lives and families in the midst of that song.

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And the thing is— And it's not saying that confession shouldn't happen, but it probably shouldn't happen that way.

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Well, and this confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, these go together.

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You know, so if you're saying, oh, I just confess my sins to everybody, okay, well, then you're also supposed to pray for everybody specifically.

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Right. But you should be praying for your members in the local church. Again, that's why

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I say formal covenantal membership. You have to know who the members are. You have to recognize their names.

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You should have their names written down. You should be praying for them. In fact, just an application, if you don't know the names of the members of your church, write them down.

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Ask your pastor. If you're a pastor, you're not praying for the members of your local church, figure out a system.

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Contact us, but figure out a system whereby you are going over the names of the members of your church and you're praying for them.

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Because we should be confessing our sins to one another in the church and we should be praying for one another in the church.

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Again, I just want to say from there, I want to talk about what this means, and I have some thoughts too. But I wanted to start, you can't approach this text without a framework of the local church.

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It's everywhere. The local church is everywhere in the New Testament. Let's say you just, let's say

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I want to read the New Testament without the local church. Well, what you would read here is just a pile of words together that would make no sense.

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Well, the whole thing about is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church.

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What church? Which church? Well, your church. The one that you belong to.

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And so, yeah, there's no way to read this without that framework. That's right. So that's a framework, and now let's get into this.

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Confess your sins one to another. Are you going to be Roman Catholic or what?

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Yeah, you need to enter the confessional, slide the little door back, and of course you're not.

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It's interesting, though. I mean, it's important, right? Confess your sins to who? The Pope? The priest?

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The pastor? It's interesting that it doesn't give those stipulations, does it? It says to one another.

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Amen, to one another. This means we need a real, not just membership in the church, but cultivating real, tangible relationships in the church.

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You need people close to you in the local body that you can confess your sins.

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And I think this also means we have to have a tangible understanding of the gospel.

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Amen, I was going to say. Because without that, I'm going to be afraid to confess my sin.

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If the idea here is that we're all proper people who come together for this meeting once a week, where we put our best clothes on, where we try to put the best exterior image out there, and hold it together for a couple of hours, and there's no tangible understanding that we're sinners who have been saved by an amazing

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Savior, well, I'm not going to want to admit in that scenario to sin.

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But if I have a tangible understanding in my church of the gospel that we're all sinners, but that Christ has redeemed us from sin, that there really is a way to move from guilt and shame to freedom, then

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I'm going to be able to go to my brother or my sister and confess my sin.

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One that I've committed, maybe even that I've committed against them. Because there's a way to be made right.

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Yeah, my righteousness doesn't get me to heaven. But if I'm in Christ, His righteousness does, and it's imputed to me.

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And there is, Romans 8, 1, no condemnation for those in Christ. So His righteous life,

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His death, my sin has been paid for. Now, I may need to make restitution. I may need to make up for things

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I've done if I've wronged someone. But my sin has been atoned for in Christ on Calvary.

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He substituted Himself in my place. The wrath of God fell upon Him, and then

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He rose again. And that's the gospel that we cling to and that we hold to. And that frees us and compels us now to confess our sins.

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Now, we move to this, what sins? I'm asking you,

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Pastor Ed. Well, he says confess your sins. You know what is so easy for us to do?

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Confess someone else's sins. Yeah, to confess cultural sins. Oh, we know as a society, we're, you know, the gays, you know the gays are those transgenders.

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It's easy to confess other people's problems than it is to actually deal with my actual sins.

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Or to turn what ought to be confession of sin into gossip about other people.

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We can do that. So I think this is twofold. I think one, it's personal sins that you struggle with and need help with.

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And two, it's sins that you've committed against a person specifically.

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In both instances, we should find the freedom to confess our sins one to another.

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Do you agree with that? Yeah, I would agree with that. Now, I guess to turn the question around, who all do

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I need to confess them to? Yeah, I think, so in my opinion, in the first category, private sins that you need help with that you want to confess,

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I think this is the closer knit group, the closer brothers, brothers that you, as a member of our church says, shout out to Steve, that you have your feet under their table, brothers that you're walking with, or sisters if you're a lady.

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This is not necessarily going around to every person in the church and saying, I struggle with this sin, or I've been tempted in this recently.

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I need help. This is more of a close -knit group. That's the best, in my opinion.

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Now, the latter, though, the person you wronged against, well, that depends on who you wronged.

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It should be whoever in the church. And I would also say this, and this kind of bleeds both categories, and that is if it's more of a public sin, then you need to confess it to the whole body or whoever may be involved.

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The more public the sin, the more public the confession. Right. Yeah. I tend to say, and I don't think this is a hard and fast rule, there can be exceptions, but the repentance generally needs to be as public as the sin.

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Right, yeah. And so, now, I want to clarify one quick thing.

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That does not mean if a person has abused, especially a child or something, but that was private, nobody else knew about it, that you can keep that private.

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You absolutely should not do that. If a person's committed a crime, that should be dealt with correctly.

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Of course. But I am saying, in general, the repentance, we're not requiring a person for every time that one of us sins against another brother that they have to come before the entire church body to repent of that sin every single time.

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Because you actually could do more damage then, because then everybody's concerned, have

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I got to come before the church this week and confess these 15 things that I did this week?

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I think you begin then to have this kind of morbid introspection.

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Yeah, and you begin to drift into potpourri. Being a papist, this is not what the scripture are advocating.

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Now, the text, confess your sins one to another, that's an imperative. That is a command.

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So you say, well, I don't know. I don't agree with you guys. Well, you don't get to define

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Christianity, and you don't get to define the church. The scriptures do. I don't know what

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I think about that. Well, here's what God thinks about it. So what I try to teach our people, and hopefully people on the podcast are listening and think through this too, the

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New Testament gets to, or the whole Bible really, gets to define Christianity, not our preferences.

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So this is what the scriptures command. This is what life in a healthy church looks like, people confessing their sins one to another, particularly when we've wronged one another.

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We are willing to own it and to ask for forgiveness and to grant forgiveness and to be hard to offend.

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That's good. Hard to offend. Like, I'm not waiting.

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I'm not ready to smite you or whatever. Our Lord is slow to anger and gracious and patient, and this is the way we treat one another in the local church.

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And, you know, I think that is so good, that being hard to offend. I mean, if we feel like in our church that we're walking around on eggshells, we've got all these raw emotions all the time, and we're so concerned that a wrongly placed word, even a wrongly placed word of confession, is going to just blow everything up, is going to offend, then we're never going to be able to feel the freedom to come and to make this kind of confession so as to be able to lay down the guilt and the shame.

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I would also say if your church, so what you said sparked a thought, like if your church wants to get to this point, it requires a complete cultural change.

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It's not just, hey, you know what? I'm going to preach James 5 .16 this Sunday, and we're going to get it.

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Because we had someone visit for Easter, I should say a child. He's a doctor, so he's a grown man.

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He's my age. But the son of a family in our church, and he lives up in a different part of the state, and so he hasn't been in a few years.

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And so he came, and he was here for Easter, and he mentioned noticing a complete different atmosphere in our church.

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Well, that's not something you perceive necessarily week to week. But if you haven't been to our church in a few years, and then you're visiting, and you have one idea a few years ago, and now you're coming now, you say, wow,

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I see the atmosphere has changed. Well, that takes time. It takes hard work. It takes patient preaching.

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It takes gospel preaching. It takes modeling. Like this is the kind of culture that we should aspire to.

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Obviously, it's the Holy Spirit that creates this, but we use the means of grace in the preaching and teaching and fellowship.

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And even as pastors owning this, you know, we're not perfect. I need God's grace. I need help.

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I need to grow. And this is all part of what it looks like to confess our sins one to another.

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So what keeps us from confessing our sins to one another?

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I know we've kind of already talked about a couple of reasons, but what else might we say really hampers?

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I'm just talking about most Christians in most evangelical churches.

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Lack of trust in the gospel. Pridefulness.

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A low view of sin in the church. A low view of our own sin and the effects that it has on ourselves and others.

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A lack of trust in the sufficiency of Scripture. A lack of understanding what the local church is to be.

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Boy, all that just came off the top of my head. But these are all reasons.

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And some people just not being converted. I'm not doing that. I'm just not doing that.

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Well, even what you said at the beginning, Christ is worthy of a healthy church. And a lot of times, even if you have a few sheep in an unhealthy church, they're not going to feel like they can confess their sin in that unhealthy church.

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There's not going to be a place where they feel like they can do that, probably.

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And another thing to think about with the idea of what might keep us from confessing our sins is we've really got this, such a privatized, personal, just me and Jesus kind of view.

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I don't need the church. That makes me say, well, of course

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I need to confess my sins to God. Yeah, I need to do that. I'm going to do that.

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I don't need the church. That's the mentality. The church is a good idea. People wouldn't say it that way.

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Church is a good idea. It's a great help. But in their heart of hearts, I don't need this. I am weak, but He is strong.

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Me and God. You know what, Josh? That's right. That's the idea. We're like two peas in a pod.

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Who's that, Josh Turner or whatever? Here's something else. You didn't know I was going to do this, but I'm going to bring this up in our prayer meeting.

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I didn't know you were going to sing on the podcast today. It was great, man. I'm going to bring this up in our prayer meeting tonight.

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But there's also this idea of corporate confession. Yes. And so in the 1670s, now you can read this in Richard Owen Roberts' book,

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Sanctify the Congregation. It's a great book. It's a collection of sermons. But Richard Owen Roberts, Sanctify the

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Congregation. But in this book, he has the resolve of a synod in 1679 from Massachusetts.

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So basically a little backstory. There were several providential, I'll call them misfortunes, in Massachusetts in the late 1670s.

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Indian raids, shipwrecks, fires, smallpox outbreaks, stuff like that.

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And this caused the congregational churches in Massachusetts to call a synod to...

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Did you say synod or synod? Whatever. Yeah, I don't know. What do you say? I think

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I normally say synod. Okay. So then, welcome to the

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Rural Church Podcast. That's right. So a meeting, and they call upon their magistrates to help seek reformation and revival in the land.

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And they saw that these providential, what I said earlier, misfortunes, were actually the righteous judgment of God upon them.

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And so they drew up a list of 14 sins that they confessed that they were guilty of.

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And I'll summarize them real quick. But what I want to say is, before I do that, because that'll take me a minute to do, do you have anything you want to say about that?

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Because sometimes we look at things happening in our culture and in our country, and even so -called natural disasters, and we don't connect these at all to the judgments or providential workings of God.

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Well, I think sometimes we don't want to be... There have been false teachers who have misappropriated those kinds of things.

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So you go off in the other ditch, yeah. And I think we go off into the other ditch of saying, oh, we don't want to be seen as the crackpot televangelist saying that Katrina happened because New Orleans was a wicked city.

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But as people that believe that God is sovereign and providential in the way that he's working, we do believe that God was bringing judgment on people.

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It's part of the curse. You're right. And we do believe that God was in control of everything that was happening when a natural disaster like that strikes.

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And so nothing is happening outside of God's will, and we ought to be recognizing that God has purposes in it, and those purposes can be purposes of judgment.

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And if nothing else, and so I don't know about that, but if nothing else, why would not the cultural crisis, the foolishness of our president, so -called natural disasters, why would that not cause you to think about the brevity of life, the worthiness of God, the necessity of the church to be who she is, and remembering judgment begins at the household of God?

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So let me just read these, Eddie, and see what you think. I'm going to read these tonight. So again, you can find these in Richard Owen Roberts' book,

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Sanctify the Congregation. I just summarize them because if I was going to read them all, it would be like forever.

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So let me just read them. So this is 14 things these churches said we need to confess. Again, I'm talking about we confess our sins privately one to another, but also there's an idea of the church confessing collectively our sins together.

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So this is what they said. Number one, there's a great invisible decay of the power of godliness among many professors in these churches.

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Two, the pride that doth abound in New England testifies against us. Three, will worship, lack of church discipline, lack of church fellowship.

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Four, the holy and glorious name of God has been polluted and profaned among us. Five, there's much

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Sabbath breaking since there are multitudes that do profanely absent themselves or theirs from the public worship of God on His holy day.

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Six, disorder in families and lack of family worship. Seven, inordinate passions, sinful heats and hatreds, and that amongst church members themselves who abound with evil surmisings, uncharitable and unrighteous censures, backbiting, hearing and telling tales, few that remember and duly observe the rule with an angry countenance to drive away the tale bearer, reproachful and reviling expressions, sometimes to or of one another.

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Eight, drunkenness and sexual immorality. Nine, great lack of truthfulness, promise breaking.

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Ten, inordinate affections to the world. Eleven, opposition to the work of reformation.

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Twelve, self -centeredness, matters pertaining to self over matters pertaining to the kingdom of God.

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Thirteen, Christ is not prized in all His offices and ordinances as He ought to be.

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And fourteen, lack of reformation from sins acknowledged.

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So today, that's just another Sunday in a Baptist church. Right. Well, yeah,

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I would say so much of that is we can't confess it because we don't even recognize so many of the things that they were calling sin.

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What? What's wrong? What are we supposed to be doing? That's just how it is today. Family worship?

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What are you talking about? Church discipline? What was that about? Inordinate love of worldly things?

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I don't struggle with that. I don't struggle with that. I gotta go watch

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Yellowstone. That's right. That's right. Woo! Gonna meddle. I mean, that's the thing, brother.

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Maybe one thing is we don't confess sins because we don't see ourselves as, you know, we see like, okay, well,

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I haven't committed adultery, haven't murdered, haven't lied. I don't have any sins to confess.

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And you think through who are, these are the forefathers, if you will, of America.

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This is 1679, almost 100 years before American independence.

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But this is the cultural mindset. God is bringing judgment.

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We need to repent. We need to seek his favor. And we don't even think like, you know what?

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When we see bad things happen in the world today, you know what we say? A lot of people say. They're like, well, this is just how it's going to be.

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You know, like dispensationalists particularly. Well, this is just how it's going to be. It's going to get worse and worse. But what if,

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I'm not trying to draw a one -to -one correlation to everything. But what if some of the things that we experience today are because God seeks to get the attention of his people and call upon them to confess their sins?

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And also, again, when you say confess our sins one to another, these things that they went through here, they're not saying this is what other people are doing.

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They're saying as a collective whole, we're guilty. There is the idea of corporate guilt.

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There is the idea of I'm guilty of these things because as a whole, this is what the landscape looks like.

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And I just look at that and I say almost, well, not, you know, 350 years ago. Look at this.

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And I'm like, these people were concerned about these things. And how much worse is it in many places today?

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And yet we refuse to confess our sins one to another. And it really does need to start with us in the church.

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Judgment begins in the household of God. A lot of times we want to rail against the excesses of the sin in the lost world.

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But we don't want to deal with the actual sin in our own midst.

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And I think when we think of this idea of confession, we do have to realize that like we started at the beginning saying, this is in the context of the local church.

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And if we really want to see our churches healthy, if we really individually want to draw near to the

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Lord with our brothers and sisters, if we're going to pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, that's going to be along with others who love the

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Lord. Yes, that's what that's what Paul says to Timothy. And so we've got to do that.

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We've got to be willing to confess our sins to one another. So we're going to really have that relationship.

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So this is like a habit, like a habit, not necessarily daily or maybe not necessarily even weekly, but this is like a regular habit of kind of like an organic.

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It's not like, hey, on Thursdays at two o 'clock, we confess our sins to one another. This is like an organic, habitual part of life in the local church.

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And I'm going to say there can be seasons of particular stated times of corporate confession.

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So an old thing that used to happen in churches were solemn assemblies. And in 2009 or maybe 2010,

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I think it was in 2009 or 10, the Southern Baptist Convention actually passed a resolution calling upon churches to have solemn assemblies.

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That wasn't that long ago. And I actually led a church in a solemn assembly and I got tons of pushback.

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But the idea of a solemn assembly is an opportunity to come together corporately, to fast, to confess.

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Again, not the church down the road sin. We're not confessing the megachurch sin that we like to pick on or Joel Osteen's sin or whatever.

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We're looking at ourselves as a body and confessing our sins one to another.

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I think the primary application of the text is the habitual, organic, regular time of when

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I've wronged someone or if I've struggled, I'm willing to talk about my sins, confess them, repent.

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Especially when I've wronged someone, I'm willing to confess, own it, repent, remember the gospel.

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So I think that's the primary application, praying for one another. But then I think that we can extend this corporately as well.

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Your thoughts? Yeah, I think that's right. And then I also think we need to remember, and with that confession of sin, there is promise.

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Like we said earlier, the better we've understood the gospel hope, the more likely we're going to be able to actually confess our sins one to another the way he's telling us to do here.

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You know, I was thinking the other day, the promise of the gospel there in Romans 10,

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Paul says that everyone who believes the

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Lord will not be put to shame. Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will not be put to shame. And there's so much shame and guilt that people feel, and they don't realize that the only way they're ever going to get rid of that is to turn to the

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Lord, call upon the Lord, repent of those sins, even confess those sins. The actual way to not feel the shame and guilt is to deal with the sin.

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But the more you try to hide the sin, hang on to the sin, and not confess and repent and turn to the

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Lord, the more you're going to have to deal with it. And so on this idea of confession, let me read from John's first letter.

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He writes here, 1 John 1, this is verse 5.

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This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you that God is light and him is no darkness at all.

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If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

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But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin.

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If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

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If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. And we see here in verse 9 so clearly, if we confess our sins, he is faithful, just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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We're not saying, man, you need to confess your sins because it'll make you feel better.

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It's a good therapeutic practice. No, no, we're saying there's real forgiveness here.

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There's real dealing with the sin here. There's real redemption here. Confess your sins because we believe we have a

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Savior whose blood, as it said in verse 7, the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin.

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Yeah, and then go into chapter 2. My little children, I'm writing these things to you so that you may not sin.

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So first of all, confession of sin is not like, well, I'll just go out and sin, right? Because then

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I'll just confess it. But no, the idea is that we fight sin, we mortify sin, we kill sin.

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I'm writing these things to you so they may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the

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Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. That's right. So when we confess our sins one to another, we're already forgiven.

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I'm not waiting for Jesus to forgive me. He's already paid for my sins. I've taken it to the

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Lord. I've dealt with it. And I want to procure the forgiveness of my brothers and sisters in Christ, but I'm not basing my eternity on them.

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I have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. But now I'm walking as I'm supposed to be.

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And to not confess our sins is to sin. So I want to do what our

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Lord Jesus has said. And again, the problem in our world today is not the fact that they feel shame.

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The problem is, actually, this could be a whole different podcast, but shame is a mercy. When we sin, we should feel shame.

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So the problem is not feeling shame. The problem is we don't properly deal with shame.

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The way that a man or woman should deal with shame is not suppressing it or doubling down on it or trying to alleviate in some other way.

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The way a man or woman should deal with shame is taking it to the cross, repenting of their sins, putting their faith in Christ.

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The way a Christian should deal with shame is to go again to the gospel, to repent. Shame is a mercy.

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So I feel ashamed for sin. Good. Take it to the cross. Remember the righteous one, the advocate that we have.

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All our hope is in Christ. And then I confess. I don't have to feel that shame now because Christ has taken it.

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And I can confess freely to my brothers and sisters who I've wronged. And I think there is a sense in which we as Christians, if we really are believing what

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God has said, you know, the last thing he says there in verse 10, if we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us.

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Look, you may at first, if this is the first time you've ever really thought about, I'm saying our listeners, have ever really thought about confession of sin to one another and you think this practice seems so crazy, so,

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I mean, so outside your paradigm. Well, the scripture says to do it.

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Like, at some point we need to say, you know what? I'm going to trust God that he knows better than I do.

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Like, it may not seem to me like I don't see how this is going to make things better, but God says it will.

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God says it has a purpose. And I think there are a lot of things that we struggle to do in the modern local church, even those of us that would consider ourselves

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Bible -believing, confessional. Still, there are times when we would say we are not pragmatists, but there are still times when

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I think we look at things that God tells us to do and we think, I just don't see how that'll work.

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And we ought to say, God said to do it. I'm going to do it because he said to do it.

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And it's got to be the right thing to do because God said to do it. And so, like you said, we need to cultivate a culture that is so gospel -saturated that this is this kind of organic, regular thing that's happening.

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But at some point, you're just going to have to say to a brother or sister, this is what

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I did, or this is the sin I'm struggling with. You're going to actually have to confess a sin to somebody, or this is never going to take place.

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And that's going to be hard. I mean, the idea that, well, if you cultivate the right culture and you've got the right understanding of the gospel, confession of sin will be easy.

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No, it's going to be hard. There are going to be times when it's really hard to confess sin.

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Yeah, that's right. That is right, brother. Man, this is good.

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I hope it's been helpful. It's been helpful to me. I say it's good not because of what we're saying but because of just thinking through this together.

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That's one of the things. I mean, we're not like some of these podcasts. We don't have the time to spend hours and hours and hours in prep for the podcast.

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We do the podcast as a way. You literally texted me last night. So it's helpful to be thinking through these things together, and we hope that we are able to impart some biblical wisdom to our brothers and sisters listening.

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And I think this is helpful. Saints, Christ is worthy of a healthy church, and part of what it means to be a healthy church is to obey

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James 5 .16. You got anything else? I would just.

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The idea for talking about this subject actually came from the last chapter of a little book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer called

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Life Together. You know, I wouldn't agree with Bonhoeffer on everything, but it is a helpful little book.

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And so if folks are looking for something, especially something dealing with thinking through some really practical things about fellowship in the local church and some of those things, it would be a helpful little book to grab ahold of.

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All right, brother. Well, thank you guys for joining us on this episode of the

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Rural Church Podcast. Share this. Share the podcast and let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback from this episode or any of the ones that you've heard in the past.

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Let us know if you want to hear more sermons, less sermons, or what kind of topics you may want to hear. You can contact me at Cuatro, C -U -A -T -R -O at, oh,

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Cuatro Nelson. C -U -A -T -R -O -N -E -L -S -O -N at gmail .com.

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And you can get ahold of Eddie at, I don't know. What is my past thing?

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I don't know. You know what? Just email me and I'll forward it to you. Yeah, yeah. Thank you guys for listening to this episode.

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Sign us off, Eddie. We'll see you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

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God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemos, the masterpiece of God.