Seven Rhythms: Freedom from Strongholds (James 5:16)

I grew up with two younger sisters. Their names are Katelyn and Ahnalisa. I am about four years older than Ahnalisa and five years older than Katelyn. So, the two of them were a good chunk younger than me, but not too young to have a strong relationship with. And because I was the oldest of our little trio, the job of pestering them fell to me. It’s dirty work, but it had to be done. I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them.

Now this is maybe one of my favorite stories of a time when pestering them got out of hand. So on this day, I was wrestling with Ahnalisa, and I was probably twelve or thirteen, so she would have been eight or nine. And I finally pinned her, but then, out of the blue, I hear Katelyn, my other sister, behind me, and she yells, “Get off my sister!” Now me and Ahnalisa were just having fun, but I don’t think Katelyn understood that. And what I didn’t know was that in Katelyn’s hand was a coin purse full of coins, which she proceeded to hurl at the back of my head.

Parents of kids around that same age will tell you that there is a cycle to these things. It always starts out harmless, but inevitably, it ends with someone in tears. And growing up, I was often the one that would take things too far and would make my sisters cry. But I developed this skill, a skill a few of you might have learned as well. I learned how to play dumb, so that when my mom came into my room with my sister standing behind her crying, it was like I had been in my room for hours. I would pretend that I had no idea what she was talking about. And in my heart, I knew that I was basically lying, and I knew that I had done something wrong, but I thought that if I just waited it out, my sister would look crazy, and my mom would give up trying to figure out what happened.

But here’s the thing I didn’t anticipate. There were a few times where I pretended so well that I convinced myself that I had done nothing wrong. My acting became my belief. And in those moments, it was like I was fragmenting myself. I was lying so hard that I no longer felt the sting of guilt. I was a stranger to myself. And looking back, my ability to do that, to convince myself that I did nothing wrong when I knew I had, is deeply scary. It might be one of the most terrifying skills I managed to learn growing up. And it’s a skill I wish I had never learned to begin with.

So now, let’s get into today’s passage. We are going to be looking at James 5:13-16 this morning. First let me read the passage, taking note of some small things, and then I’ll give a little bit of a wider scope about the whole letter of James.

(James 5:13-16, ESV) “Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is anyone among you 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 Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the 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. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”

Now, there are a few tricky things in this passage. On its face, it seems fairly straightforward, but if you look under the hood, you’ll get a different story. One of my old Bible professors from George Fox says that “Every translation is a work of interpretation.” And what he is getting at is that every time anyone tries to take something written in one language and translate it into a new language, many of the original words will not fit neatly into the new language. And beyond that, sometimes a word in one language can have several different meanings. Grammar nerds will call this semantic range. And a lot of the time, context, the words surrounding a word, will help you figure out in what sense that word is being used. But, there are some times where the context just isn’t clear enough to make a judgment call. And this is even true in Bible translations. But the translators can’t just say, “well we are stumped on this one, so we are going to leave it blank.” So they choose the one that feels the most likely, even if it’s only slightly more likely, even like 51-49 likely.

The reason I’m telling you all this is because this passage has a little bit of that going on. The translators had to make a choice. And the choice they had to make was whether to translate the words in this passage as referring to some sort of spiritual weakness or as referring to a physical sickness. For example, in verse 14, it says that if someone is “sick” they should call the elders and they should anoint and pray for him. And that makes sense, but the word they are translating as “sick” can also just mean “weak.” And then in verse 15, when it says the prayer of faith will save the one who is “sick,” the word used there can mean “weary.” And the word “save” can mean to “heal” or to “make whole” or even to “deliver.” And even again the word for “raise him up” can be used to talk about raising up someone from sickness or about raising someone up during the final Resurrection. And finally, in verse 16, where we read “that you may be healed,” that word too is used in a few places metaphorically to talk about spiritual healing, being healed from sin.

So why am I saying all this? Well, firstly, I think it’s important to engage with the Scriptures to the best of our abilities. And I am no Greek scholar, but I’ve learned through much help how bits and pieces of it work. So, I didn’t want to just gloss over it as if it doesn’t matter. But perhaps even a stronger reason I wanted to bring this up is that I actually think the metaphorical connection between someone having a bodily sickness and having a stronghold or spiritual weakness is a really important one. In both cases, we are dealing with something that wasn’t meant to be there in the first place, and that is destroying the person that it dwells in. In that way, both sin and sickness are like parasites. In fact, in both cases, we see that if you take a closer look, there is actually something with its own mind and purposes at work. We know now in the 21st century that in many cases, when someone is sick, there is a microorganism that is alive and spreading in us. In other words, there is something else with its own motives using our bodies to do its thing. And the more it spreads, the more sick we get. The more of us it takes over, the less of us remain healthy. And in the same way, the Apostle Paul describes sin as not just an action or some sort of category for bad behavior, but actually as a living thing that is gaining its life by taking away my life. In Romans 7:19-20 he writes, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.”

So we see that sin and sickness are both other entities, other things, that are taking us over to do what they want in us. And in that way, we are not fully ourselves when we are sick or when we are sinning. So for today, I’m going to spend time trying to interpret James 5:16,

“Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” I’m going to unpack those two parts of healing: confession and prayer, and in the end, I want you to walk away with an understanding that confession surfaces our sins, and prayer removes them. That's going to be my big idea for this week.

So, with that all being said, I’d love to share with you a really cool thing that I noticed as I reread the book of James. For many people in the Church, James is their favorite book. It is short, simple, and punchy. It’s got a lot of really strong advice in it, and a lot of strong critiques of sins that the Church chronically struggles with. It sounds a lot like an expansion or reiteration of the Sermon on the Mount. But, I have always struggled with the book of James because I couldn’t figure out what tied all these teachings together. The theme of the book eluded me.

So this time, as I was reading, I set out to notice the smallest details I could, hoping that I might find a theme that ran throughout the whole of the book. And honestly, I think I just got lucky. But I did find one.

The theme that I caught from the very first chapter is this theme of purity and impurity. For something to be pure, it must be one thing. For instance, when you mine for gold, what you end up getting is actually something that is about ninety percent gold and ten percent other junk, like earth and other metals. So to make “pure gold,” refineries will heat the gold up until it is a red hot liquid, and when it is liquid, the “impurities in it,” the metals and earth that are trapped in it, rise to the top or sink to the bottom. And then, once they have cooled it off, the gold bar has this crud on the top and bottom, but in between is all pure gold. In other words, there is nothing in the bar except for gold. Then, they put it through a series of chemical baths that burn away and remove all that crud on the outside, so the whole bar is shiny and clean. That’s the kind of purity I’m talking about, and that’s the type of purity that I think James has in mind throughout the whole of his letter. In simple terms, purity means to not be two things, to not devote yourself to two missions in life, to not be double-minded as James says.

Let me show you some examples from this letter where this theme comes up. In total, I found that nine out of the eleven chunks within the letter make reference to some sort of purity. In chapter 1, James tells his audience to believe without doubting when they pray. Belief, for James, is corrupted by doubt. To believe and doubt at the same time is to be double-minded. Then he says that everyone should not just hear the word, but also do it. To hear the word and consider yourself a hearer, but then not obey is to contradict yourself. It is to be double-minded. In chapter 2, he says that faith without works is dead. To believe and not act is to contradict yourself and to be double-minded. In chapter 3 he says that they need to tame their tongues, because out of the same mouth they are blessing God and then cursing their neighbor, and he compares this to a stream that is filled with both freshwater and saltwater. Clearly, a river can either have clean water or salt water. It can’t have both. Otherwise it would be somehow split. It would be double-minded. In chapter 4, James says that the people are fighting with each other because they have desires within themselves that are battling each other. In other words, they are double-minded.

And he even says in James 4:8, “Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” And one last one I’ll show you, in chapter 5, he says that above all else, they should not swear. And that might seem strange to us, but think about why promises might be problematic. In a promise, you’re basically saying, “I know sometimes I am not telling the truth when I talk to you, but this time I really am telling the truth. I promise.” Used wrongly, promises assume that people don’t have to tell the truth all the time. Instead, James says at all times to “let your yes be yes and your no be no.”

So now that you can see this dense theme of integrity, purity, and being single-minded, not double-minded throughout the book of James, let’s talk about why this matters for our passage for today.

In today’s passage, whether we treat this as a passage mainly speaking about bodily illnesses or about spiritual weaknesses, it is addressing a type of impurity. Sickness makes us less of who we are. Sin makes us less of who we are. In both cases, it’s like there are two minds in us. There is our actual mind, and then there is the mind of either the sickness or the sin, and they are at war with each other. The sin wants to multiply and keep us in slavery, even if it kills us, the sickness wants to take over as much of us as it can, even if it kills us. And a great example of this double-mindedness is what I was doing as a young dude, pretending nothing happened while my sister stood there crying. I was burying my sin, like the bits of debris and crud in a bar of unrefined gold. I was making myself less pure. I was splitting myself. There was the sinful me, and then there was the innocent mask I was putting on.

Now, for today’s theme, freedom from strongholds, we are going to address James 5:16, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”

Going back to the lack of clarity in this passage, I think there is a sense in which you could interpret the passage either way. So, I’m actually inclined to read it as being intentionally left vague so as to include both ideas. In other words, I think James might have been keeping it unclear on purpose. But for today I will look at it specifically from the angle of spiritual healing, healing of someone’s sinfulness.

I think the analogy of gold refining is actually a really helpful one for understanding James’ words here. Like I said before, there are two steps in the refining process. You have to bring all the impurities that are inside the gold to the surface, and then you have to remove them. James here mentions two things that will lead to healing. The first is confessing our sins to each other and the second is praying for each other. And when you think about it, confessing your sins is very much like bringing the impurities that are hidden on the inside to the surface.

To confess your sins doesn’t get rid of your sins. Only the Holy Spirit can do that. But until you are able to see your sins and acknowledge them, good luck knowing what to pray for. Once they are on the surface, we know what to pray for, and prayer is like the chemical bath that loosens or dissolves our sins. You can’t pray for something you can’t see, so you actually need to confess your sins to bring them out into the light, and from there, the Spirit will work to get rid of them entirely, leaving you purer and purer each day. So, confession surfaces our sins and prayer removes them.

But there is another way in which that analogy resonates well. And that is that in order to get the impurities to the surface, you have to subject the gold to extreme heat. And I think that for many of us, confessing our sins can feel like taking a heat bath. It is perhaps the most unpleasant of the 7 rhythms, because in it we are coming to terms with the reality of how far we are from where we are meant to be. It can be even more embarrassing than talking to your doctor about how many vegetables you are actually eating, or hearing a lecture from the dentist about how you really ought to be flossing. And sometimes it can bring up as much anxiety as waiting on a doctor’s call to hear your diagnosis.

I remember the days, as I was entering into my teen years, of feeling so ashamed to confess what I had been watching on the internet, deleting my search history, trying to hide it. I remember all the times I had to go up to my sisters and apologize for being a jerk. I remember sending an email with shaky hands apologizing to a professor that I had spoken bad about behind her back in college. And even today, when I say something out of pride or anger or a biting sense of humor, and I feel that prick of conscience to go and apologize, or to confess my sins to my brothers, Pastor Paul, Pastor Jace, Pastor Daniel, Gunnar, I do resist for a second. I don’t want to experience the hot coals that confession can feel like. But the reality is that if I don’t confess my sins, they just grow stronger. I end up fragmenting myself, wearing a mask, pretending to be someone I’m not. I become impure, looking shiny like gold on the outside, but really filled with bits of crud on the inside. And the more I avoid confession, the more my integrity drops. The less people can trust me. The less value I bring to relationships. The less I am who I want to be.

But then there is the moment after I’ve confessed, and I hear from the person that now knows the evil parts of me those words: “You are forgiven.” And suddenly, it feels like I don’t have to hide anything anymore. I know that I am fully myself. I may struggle with sin still, but I’m not holding onto it, concealing it, stuffing it down. I’m like that gold bar after all the crud has been brought to the surface. The crud is still there, but there is no confusing it for the gold anymore. They’re clearly separate. And now the work can be done to get rid of that crud. Now my brother can pray for me, I can pray honestly for myself, and the Spirit can remove the crud. Confession surfaces our sins and prayer removes them.

So now, I’ll ask you a question. Each of us have strongholds in our lives, areas where our sin has grabbed hold, areas where the Spirit wants to free us, to soften the crud in our heart and make us pure. But are your strongholds beneath the surface? Are they hidden? Are you honest about them? And I’m not saying you need to wear a t-shirt with a list of all your sins on it. But does someone know what’s really going on with you? Do the people close to you have an idea of who you really are, of what you really struggle with? And I’m not just talking about your diary or even the things you say to God in the privacy of your own heart.

Confession between you and God is so great, but if you only confess to God, you are still split. There’s the “you” that you’re showing God, and there’s the “you” you’re showing to those close to you, and they aren’t the same “you.” Now, I know not everyone can handle the intimate brokenness and issues you deal with. So, there is room for discernment with all this. But does your husband know? Does your wife know? Do you have an accountability partner who knows? Do you have a spiritual director who knows? Maybe a small group leader? A pastor? Someone?

If you don’t, I want to encourage you to take that step this week. James very easily could have said to just confess your sins to God and pray for yourself, but instead, he says to confess your sins to one another and to pray for one another. Remember Jesus says, “Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in Heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them.” As much as Jesus is there in your private prayers to God, I believe Jesus is even more present in the Body. And I think James knew that.

So maybe you’ve got some impurity hidden beneath the surface that you’ve never confessed to anyone. I encourage you to think of the person you trust most, and to reach out this week to ask them if you can get something off your chest. Maybe it’s been a while since you’ve confessed your sins, and as you reflect, there is something you’d like to unearth and bring to the surface. If you’ve got that brother or sister you always talk to about this stuff, give them a call or ask them to coffee this week. Maybe even just send them a text, and after confessing, ask them to pray with you.

Maybe you’ve never confessed your sins to anyone before. If you’re new to this, and you’d like to see it modeled for you so you can learn the ropes, I’d recommend you jump into our Ten-Week Discipleship Journey that is starting September 17th. I’ll be leading a group, and in it you’ll get a chance to practice all seven of the rhythms that make the Christian life whole, including confession. You can ask for more info out in the lobby!

Now I imagine a few of you in this room might not even trust Jesus at all. Maybe you’re still figuring out what you think. That’s good, and we’re so glad you are here. One universal human experience, one thing that all humans feel, is a sense that they could be doing better, that they aren’t all they could be. It’s one of the great mysteries of life why we have such a deep sense of who we ought to be. And so maybe you’re not about the Jesus stuff, but you can at least agree that we humans are a messed up bunch. I’ll be around after service, and so will our prayer team at the front of the room and a few other of the pastors here. Come grab one of us! We would love to get to know you, hear any of your questions, and walk with you right where you’re at.

Life Level Application

1. When you were growing up, do you remember your parents coming up to you to apologize for something they did wrong?

2. Have you ever confessed something you did wrong to someone who wasn't affected by it to get it off your chest?

3. How important do you think confessing to one another is as opposed to confessing only to God?

4. Do you currently have someone in your life who you feel like you could trust with your confessions?

5. Do you currently feel like you have a stronghold or two that need to be brought to the surface so that they can be loosened?