City Life Starter

Written by Scott Fiddler

The Word

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

Reflection

Introverts are, by definition, hesitant to talk to others. We are even more hesitant to talk about ourselves. It is how we are made. If you are an introvert,  you know how hard it is to share what I am about to share about myself.

I once had a furuncle, which is an infection of a hair follicle, caused by the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, resulting in a painful purulence-filled bump under the skin.  This is what is commonly referred to as a boil, and purulence is the medical term for pus, which a disgusting word for dead white blood cells, bacteria, tissue debris and serum that accumulate at the location of an infection. 

Prepare yourself because this gets worse. I had this purulence-filled bump on a place one would expect to get an infected hair follicle if that place was compressed against a chair for 8-10 hours per day while one is doing lawyerly things.

So, I have this boil on my arse, and it is painful, and it is not going away. So, I go to the doctor, thinking, as I had always heard about boils, that he is going to “lance” it, like King Arthur or Sir Galahad. No big deal, right? 

Well, the surgeon told me they don’t do that anymore—that’s apparently medieval. Instead they “incise” it, which is a medical term for “cutting it open with a knife.”  

“So, I guess you’ll use local anesthesia before you incise?” I queried. 

“No,” he said, “we just incise it”

“Isn’t that sort of medieval?” I thought. 

I’ll spare you some of the repulsive details of this furuncle-incising adventure, except to say that getting incised without anesthesia is painful and that it was followed by the surgeon pushing on both sides of the incised skin to extrude the purulence. The incision is not sutured so the wound can be exposed and heal, and it did heal after a few days.

Application

In the scripture above, James says we are to confess our sins to one another and pray for one another that we may be healed. James is not talking about forgiveness here; we don’t need to confess our sins to one-another to be forgiven. James is talking about healing, being cured from sin that has infected our life.

Sin, like infection, thrives in the dark and secret where it can’t be seen. We use fancy words to euphemize and rationalize this soulish infection and avoid facing how disgusting and displeasing it really is. Then, the longer we let it go, the more painful it becomes. Eventually, the dark and secret may even become open and obvious to those around us, though we may not realize it. 

Confessing our sins to one another is like excising a boil. In doing so, we drain the sin and the death it causes of their power and expose the wound to the prayer of a trusted brother or sister in Christ, so healing can come. 

Prayer

Lord, thank You that You not only have provided a way for forgiveness of sin but for excising it from our lives. Amen.