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.
James 5:16
Christianity requires a great deal of courage. This point can be fleshed out in a number of ways. For starters, Jesus tells us to forgive, forgive, forgive (Matt 18:22). Forgiving people takes courage. We find comfort in the idea that we can bring justice to our own circumstances. We have been hurt, harmed, offended, vilianized and we want to set things straight. It takes courage to leave the matter to God and trust that justice will be done. It takes courage to lay down our natural (fallen) instincts of revenge and choose forgiveness. Doing things that are not natural is hard.
It also takes great courage to be fully obedient to Christ in a non-Christian world. The world today tells us that faith and politics are private matters in life. Keep your faith and politics to yourself if you want a peaceful existence. Jesus, on the other hand, says to share your faith; that our faith is to be like a city on a hill for all to see (Matt 5:14). To obey Jesus rather than conform to culture demands courage. It means opening oneself to attack and criticism from followers of another master with whom you cohabit.
The thing that takes the most courage is dragging our sin into the light. Sin looses its power the moment it comes into the light. Sin lives and thrives in darkness. It likes to stay hidden in the heart. Sin is happy there and non-Christian culture is happy for it to stay there. As long as sin stays hidden then we can all be content together in our guilty pleasures that deceitfully annihilate us.
It is taboo to drag sin into the light. It makes us and others uncomfortable. It means admitting that there’s an ugly side of us that we’ve been trying to hide our entire lives. Success in life means showing the world our attractive, favorable, powerful, and competent sides. It is entirely counter-intuitive to reveal to the world the ugly, smelly, weak, and incompetent side of our self.
Confession takes courage.
It’s no wonder we don’t see revival more often. Revival always begins with prayer and confession. Public confession of sin releases the floodgates of revival because it is driven by a love and commitment to Jesus that is stronger than our love and commitment to our selves. In order for Jesus to deal with our sins, we have to bring them to him. In order for the power of the cross to be released into our lives and into the world we must confess sin. Without the confession and repentance of sinners, the world will not see the Lord (Heb 12:14).
