Finding Freedom

This is what God made us for. This is what community is supposed to be. Now, we know that tragically, the story continues, and community is corrupted. And so in the very next verse, Genesis 3:1, it says, "Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, 'Did God actually say, you shall not eat from any tree of the fruit?'" So we have this beautiful description of community, and of course, because of the way the text is written, it almost seems like immediately the serpent comes in with this temptation. But there's no timeframe given. We're just told that this happens.

There's an interesting little thing in the Hebrew that we don't see in the English — it's a wordplay. The word for naked was arom. The word for the serpent being crafty is arum. You can't miss it in the Hebrew when you're reading it and you hear it out loud. And so the craftiness of the serpent comes against the woman and the man at the point of their relationship. The serpent is shrewd. He's crafty. He's tricksy, as Gollum said. The author's intentional use of this wordplay is telegraphing something: the serpent is targeting the community of the first couple. And of course he is, because it's in that community, in that vulnerability and authenticity, that the imaging of God is taking place. So this is what he attacks.

The serpent isn't just trying to get them to break a rule. He's not just trying to get them to make a bad choice. Sometimes when we think about sin, that's how we tend to think about it — we think about it objectively, externally. Here's a list of things I'm supposed to do. Here's a list of things I'm not supposed to do. And that's how it works. But the serpent is trying to do something not external, but internal. He's trying to get them to bend, to not reflect the glory of God that they were designed to receive and reflect. And tragically, that's exactly what happens.

You know the story of the deceit, and that the fruit was appealing, and how she took it and gave it to Adam, and he took it and ate. I don't want to focus on the details of the temptation this morning, but on the results of it. The first thing that the text tells us after the choice to sin is this: "The eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were arom — naked — and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths." So the moment of disobedience, the moment they turn the mirrors of their lives away from the glory of God to something else, what they had from God is lost. The life they were experiencing and enjoying is tarnished. It's bent. It's corrupted.

So the nakedness, the unguardedness, the beauty of community is instantly transformed into something to be feared. They look at each other and see each other for the first time through the lens of differences, and those differences are to be covered. Those differences are the source of shame. Their eyes are opened, and what do they do? They sew fig leaves together and make themselves loincloths. They cover the parts of them that are different. The mirror has been bent, and they hide. They hide from each other because sin has entered the picture.

And then God shows up. "They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden." We all do things that we have no hope of pulling off — and this is clearly one of them. I'm going to hide from God. Well, good luck. But see, it's so tragic. This story is so tragic. Sometimes I think we're so familiar with it that we lose the sense of what's really going on. The God who made them for Himself, the God who dwelt in their midst, the God who invited them into His family and into His work, the God who provided them with everything, the God who loved them — now they hide from Him in the bushes. They hide from each other. They hide from God.

And the corruption isn't quite complete yet. "The Lord God called to the man and said to him, 'Where are you?' And he said, 'I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was arom — I was naked — and I hid myself.' And he said, 'Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?' And the man said, 'The woman you gave to me — she gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate.'" So from shame to blame. This is the pattern. This is the pattern. Adam can't accept or own responsibility. And on first glance it looks like he's blaming Eve, but he's not. He's blaming God. It's the woman you gave me. You set me up for this.

Now Eve doesn't do any better — sorry, ladies. "The Lord God said to the woman, 'What is this that you have done?' And the woman said, 'The serpent de—'"

The serpent deceived me, and the devil made me do it. What is going on in that passage is this tragic fall, a loss. They had beauty and community and vulnerability. They had true freedom — true freedom to be themselves, unfiltered, unashamed — and in an instant sin corrupts all of that. And so they go from joy to shame, from openness to hiding, from union to separation. And they do what we all tend to do when that happens. They blame. They won't take responsibility. It has got to be somebody else's fault.

What we need to see in that story of that first fall is that the effect of sin upon Adam and Eve was a functional effect. It wasn't external. It wasn't abstract. It wasn't just some sort of objective rule or law that was broken, although it certainly includes that, but it was primarily functional and relational — sin destroyed their relationships. It corrupted their community. And if you keep reading in the text, God comes and He brings judgment upon Adam and upon Eve and upon the serpent. You read through God's judgment — the cursing of the ground, the expulsion from the garden, the conflict of the seeds — and all of the judgment that comes as a result of sin is relational. It deals with the relational dysfunction between man and God, between man and each other, between man and God's good creation.

This is why we all have that innate desire to know and be known — it is the echo of Eden that resides within our souls. This is what we are made for. You are not made to hide. You are not made to be alone. And so we long for it, but we also know something else in our bones. We are not what we should be. We are not what we could be. We know the reality of shame, the fear of being found out, and so more often than any of us would like to admit, we do exactly what Adam and Eve did. We make loincloths. We hide in the bushes. We blame and point the finger everywhere except where it needs to go, which is toward ourselves. We feel shame, and then we blame. This is just one of those realities of what it means to be a human being in the world we inhabit today.

We were made to be these mirrors that receive and then reflect the goodness and glory of God, but our mirrors have been bent. They have been tarnished. They have been defaced. The good news is they have been defaced, but it has not been erased. We are not irreparably broken. We have not lost the ability — and this is where the good news of Jesus and the gospel comes in. Jesus comes to deal with our sin.

This is also where our modern evangelical theology often lets us down, because in the church today, we primarily look at sin as a crime, as an objective moral violation. Sin is not doing the good thing you are supposed to do, or sin is doing the bad thing that you are not supposed to do. We can think of it in terms of lists, and then we can create a spreadsheet that tells us how many good things we have done and how many bad things we have done. We try to balance it out. All the religious surveys over the last hundred years — you talk to people and ask, what is your hope? Why do you think you are going to go to heaven after you die? And the answer is: well, I tried to do more good things than I did bad things. There is this idea that that is what sin is. And then of course, God is holy and God is just, and so because we have a sin problem, God has to deal with it, and so Christ comes to pay that penalty on our behalf. He dies our death so that we can live His life. He receives our judgment so that we receive His reward.

Let me be clear — all of that is absolutely, vitally true. Wondrously, mysteriously, scandalously true. And it is also an incomplete picture and understanding of what sin is, because it does not take into consideration what sin actually does. Sin is not only an objective reality, it is a subjective one. It not only renders us guilty, it reduces us. It changes us. This was the whole heart of the idol series done over Lent — we become what we behold. The moment we took our eyes off of God, we become lesser, smaller, dimmer. The corruption is revealed relationally. It severs us from God and from each other and from the goodness of God's creation.

Sin is not only a crime. It is a crime, but it is not only a crime — it is a sickness. And when we turn from the source of life, we are infected, we are distorted, we are diminished. Sin is not just something we do. Sin is a power that works in us and against us. The good news of Jesus is that He came not only to declare us forgiven, not only to deal with the objective reality of sin. Jesus comes to bring us freedom from all of sin — the objective and the subjective. He comes to make us healthy. He comes to make us whole. He comes to heal us from the ravages, the corruption, the diminishment of sin.

I think this helps explain what I consider to be one of the great elephants in the sanctuary of the American church. If Christ has made us free, then why do we not experience that freedom?

Why do we hide every bit as much as Adam and Eve did in the garden from God and from each other? Simply put, I think we do it because we have a misunderstanding, a malformed understanding of sin and what it is and what it does. And then accordingly, we don't understand the gift that God has given us of confession. And what a gift it is.

Confession is one of those words that, tragically, we tend to hear as a burden, as an obligation, maybe even as a duty. Confession is not an obligation owed to God, and it's not a system for managing our shame. It is the gift of God. It is the discipline of freedom. It is the act of opening up our hands to give to God what only God can deal with, what only God can cover, what only God can heal.

I want to unpack the idea of confession this morning from two passages of scripture. We're going to look at Psalm 32, and we're going to look at James chapter 5 together. Psalm 32 is very well known. I'm willing to bet, though, that you've missed a very important detail in the psalm, or rather before the psalm. Psalms have these little introductions sometimes, and usually in your Bibles they're in smaller print, and we just ignore them and go right into the psalm.

Psalm 32 at the beginning says it is a maskil of David. Don't we all love a good maskil? This is why we just pass over it — because I don't know what a maskil is, and I'm too busy pretending to know everything and have it all figured out to actually stop and ask, what is a maskil? A maskil is a didactic poem. It's a type of wisdom literature that's designed to convey information, to teach something important. It comes from the Hebrew word sakal, which means to be prudent and to have insight. So what this little inscription tells us at the beginning of Psalm 32 is that David is writing a poem to teach us something that he has learned the hard way, and he wants us to learn from him so that we might not have to make the same mistakes that he has.

So he writes this:

I like that. I hold on to that idea of sin being covered, being hidden. David starts this psalm with a picture, a description of what genuine blessedness looks like. This is one of those words that is really important in the Hebrew, and it doesn't translate well into English because the range of its meaning is so big. The Psalms start with this word — blessed — right? It's the word that Jesus goes to in the Sermon on the Mount to describe what real life with God looks like, and that life is blessed. It's not describing an emotional state. This is not a warm, fuzzy word, nearly as much as it's a covenantal condition. It describes the person who is in right relationship with God.

So the psalm opens with a promise and an invitation. God can and will forgive, and when we experience what only God can give — that genuine forgiveness, that covering that only God can give — the result is that we receive this blessedness. Our word happy is so inadequate, but it is involved in this. I like to translate this word as freedom, because if I had to pick one English word to summarize what's being described here, it would be that — this idea of unfiltered, unrestricted life, life as it was meant to be lived. That's what is being described, and that comes as a result of God's willingness and ability to cover our sins, to forgive.

The psalm then continues with one of the most physiologically precise descriptions of unconfessed sin and its consequences anywhere in the scriptures. David says:

He starts with this beautiful picture of what life can be in right relationship with God — the freedom and joy and beauty and goodness that comes when God has forgiven and covered us — and then he turns to its opposite. When I kept silent. In the Hebrew, this means to refrain from speaking. This is not a passive silence. It's a deliberate, chosen silence. It's the silence of hiding, rather than the silence of peace. David says, when I chose to hide my sin, to cover it up — and I know nobody here in the room has ever even thought about attempting that, but just humor me this morning — when I chose to hide my sin and cover it up, something happened to me.

His language here is profound. He says, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. The bones wasting away — this is the Hebrew word bala, and it's a word that is used for worn-out garments, the decay brought on by age, the loss of structural integrity. David is saying that when he chose to hide and cover his sin, his body began to suffer. Because sin is not just spiritual. Sin is not merely sim—

Sin is simply objective. Sin is a very real and deadly force that changes us, diminishes us. David says, when I tried to cover up my own sin, when I tried to hide it, when I did that Adam and Eve hiding game and tried to cover it up, it began to eat me up. My bones were wasted away through my groaning all day long. This is an interesting word — it is the word used to describe the roaring of a lion. It is an involuntary, inarticulate cry. So what David is saying is that when he refused to own it, when he was trying to cover and hide and play that shame and blame game, the internal pressure of unconfessed sin produced something that functions like a roar. It cannot be formed into words. It is the body's protest against what the will is suppressing. There is a reality to sin that eats away at us, that hurts us, that destroys us.

He says, day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. There is an interesting play on words in the Hebrew here. He says, your hand was heavy on me. It is the word kaved. And kaved comes from the same root as kavod, which is the word for glory. So he says, your hand was heavy upon me — the weight that the image bearer was designed to carry is the weight of glory. The weight bearing down on David in his silence is a distorted, inverted form of the same word. He was made to bear glory. He is bearing concealment instead. The weight is real either way. Sin is not just something that David did and hid. Sin is something that is doing something to him. It is destroying him.

We could go around the room this morning and we have all got stories of how sin has done that to us. It just destroys us from the inside out. But the psalm then turns. It says, I acknowledged my sin to you. I did not cover my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. David now makes another choice. First he chose to stay silent. First he chose to try to hide and cover his sin, but now he makes a different choice. He says, I chose to acknowledge my sin, to own it.

The word there for acknowledge is interesting. It is the word yada — it is the word for knowing. I chose to know it. I chose to stop hiding from reality. I chose to acknowledge what was there right in front of me. David knows his sin, and in knowing it, he confesses it. The word here for confess is also an interesting word. It is a word that is primarily translated in the Hebrew scriptures as praise or thanksgiving. The fundamental idea of the word is that it is the verbal act of lifting something up to God. That is what confession is — it is the verbal act of lifting something up to God. And so it is a very appropriate word for praise, where we are lifting our voice, lifting our hearts, lifting up adoration. But when we are dealing with confession, we are lifting something verbally up to God that we cannot deal with, but He can. He does not hide it, does not try to cover it. He lifts it to God. And in so doing he finds forgiveness.

See what a gift confession is. What a blessing it is. It is not something to be feared or avoided. Without it, where are we? Without confession, how do we find blessedness? How do we find a right relationship? How are we restored? How is the reality of sin dealt with? I think far too many of us see confession in a negative light — something to be feared at worst, or an obligation owed to God at best. But ultimately what it is is a gift.

I do not think for a second that the confusion around confession in the modern American church context is accidental. I think it is what the enemy has been doing from the beginning. The deceiver, the liar, wants to keep you stuck in your sin. He wants to keep you sick in your sin. He wants you to stay silent in your sin. The enemy loves it when you feel shame and cast blame at anyone but yourself and hide. This is where he wants us to stay — in the dark, hiding and covering your sin — because the enemy knows this: he knows that if you stop covering your sin and you lift it up to God, then God can cover your sin. That is the interplay of Psalm 32 from verse one to verse five. Who is going to cover your sin? It is not a question of whether you have sin — you have it. I say this all the time, and I have met most of you: we all have a sin problem. Why do we feel the need sometimes to pretend that we do not? The question is, who is going to cover it? Who is going to deal with it?

I know what it is like to try to cover it and hold it yourself, and it does not go well. I have told this story before. When I was in Portland, before we moved here, I had planted a church. I loved what God was doing there. I had bought cemetery plots. I was there, and then one day I was praying and I heard God —

And this was as near an audible voice as you're going to get in prayer — I heard God say to me, your time is done here. I've got something else for you. And I, being the righteous man of God that I was, said no. No. No. No. This is not the plan. It's a longer story and all that, but at the end of the day, God clearly told me, I've got something else for you, and I said no. It seems to be a good definition of sin to me.

Here was the problem. After that, every time I prayed, that's the only thing I heard from God. Every time. Your time's done here. I've got something else. So I made the really wise decision of just stopping praying. It's hard to be a follower of Jesus and not pray. It's hard to pastor a church and not pray. So it's really hard, but it began to consume me. I was sick. I was always tired. Like what David's describing in Psalm 32, this is not just poetic language. This happens. This is what sin does to us.

When we choose to go the other way, when we turn the mirror away from God to anything else, we're not receiving light — we're filling ourselves with darkness. We're not receiving life — we're filling ourselves with death. What do you think's going to happen? It begins to eat away at you. And I thought I was doing a pretty good job of hiding it. I was terrified of telling anybody in my church. I didn't want to tell my wife. I didn't want to tell anybody, because I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I wasn't quite ready to stop doing it either, and it was eating me away, and eating me away, and eating me away.

And then there was this amazing couple in my church, and they just pulled me aside after service one day, and they said, you need to tell us something. I was like, no, I don't. You're confused. They said, no, there's something going on. We've seen it. We've been watching it. What is going on with you? And then I just went full-blown ugly cry — messy, the whole thing. And it was so good. It was so good to say, this is what God's been saying, and this is what I've been doing, and just feel this sense of relief. I'd been trying to hide it. I'd been trying to cover it, and it had been killing me.

I am so grateful to that couple. They took that risk to come to me and say, what are you hiding? They knew me enough. They loved me enough to walk into a very difficult conversation. I will treasure them for as long as God gives me life and breath, and throughout eternity, for how they helped me lift my sin to God so that He could cover it. And part of the challenge with confession is that, like everything in our world, we tend to look at it through an individualized lens. It becomes this individualized objective truth or spiritual practice. But there is something about confession in community that cannot be experienced by confessing alone. It's just the way it is. It's the way God has designed things.

We're made for that kind of deep, intimate community, and sin destroys that deep, intimate community. So doesn't it make sense that the healing and the restoration of it would take place in community? This is where James 5 becomes so important. James 5 verse 13 says this:

That sounds familiar, right? It sounds like Paul's instructions we looked at the last couple of weeks. Anybody suffering, go to the body. Anybody celebrating, sing to the body. This is a communal reality. And verse 14 starts to get a little tricky.

All right, so that's a weird verse. Let's be honest about that. It's a verse that has been abused and misunderstood, especially in the health, wealth, and prosperity sort of movement. If anyone is sick, call for the elders, and the prayer of faith will save them, and the Lord will raise them up. Some have seen this verse as teaching that every physical illness is the result of sin, and that if we just confess our sins, we never have to be sick again. Let me be clear — that is not what this is teaching.

It says, if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Notice it says if, not because. There is not a direct correlation drawn to every sickness. Sickness and lack of health can have multiple origins. One of them is sin. But sometimes when we're physically struggling, like David described in Psalm 32, the physiological maladies that we encounter can have as their origin the sins that we've chosen and the covering of those sins. But not all the time. Some illness just comes from living in a broken world. But James is drawing this connection together intentionally, and so if —

If you're sick, you should go and you should seek the Lord and get the elders, get the leaders, get the wise people in the church, and pray. There's a healing that comes in that process that's not found elsewhere. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.

What James is doing here is drawing the same connection that David did in Psalm 32. If you're sick, there's a chance that sickness is rooted in sin. If it is, the very act of going to somebody else in the church and asking for prayer, revealing your need, humbling yourself and going, "I can't do this, I need help" — just that very act is an act of uncovering. It's an act of coming out of the bush and stopping our hiding. And when that happens, the language he uses is so beautiful and important. He says that the prayer of faith will save them. The word here is sozo. It has this sense — and I've talked about this just a few weeks ago — we tend to read this "saving" judicially, but sozo's primary use is actually in the medical field. It's of healing, of restoration to wholeness.

God doesn't just look at the list of good things we didn't do and the list of bad things we did do and say, "Okay, I'm going to tear up the list." Well, great, that's nice. But what about what it's done to me? God doesn't come and just tear up the list and say, "Figure it out." Sin is corrupting us. It's destroying us. It's infected us. So God has to come and He's got to deal with the transgression, of course. But He's got to deal with the reality of what sin has done and is doing to us, to restore to wholeness.

And then James uses this word — he says the Lord will raise him up. This is an interesting word. It's a resurrection word. It's the word used when describing Jesus returning to life. James reaches for this resurrection terminology not to say, "If you pray and you'll be healed and forgiven, then you're never going to be sick again, you're never going to die, you're never going to have any trouble." That's not what he's saying. He's using it to describe what restoration from sin sickness looks like — that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work when the community prays over the one who has finally stopped hiding. When that happens, when our sin is lifted up to the Lord, then He covers it. He deals with it. He deals with us.

So James is saying, listen — if we hide and cover our sins, we're effectively turning the mirror of our life from the source of life to sources of death. We begin to die. We're bent. We're distorted. We're diminished. But if we will uncover, if we will confess, if we will repent, we can be rescued, healed — not just forgiven, but restored, unbent, brought back to life. Blessed. We're made free.

In that light, verse 16 then makes sense. There are a lot of "one anothers" in the New Testament — pray for one another, love one another, forgive one another, bear one another's burdens. But this is the one another that I think is least talked about, the least popular. He says, therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. For the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

The Greek word here for confessing your sins to one another is a word that means to make a public acknowledgment, to bring outward what has been kept inward. It's to uncover. And it's a present imperative, meaning it is an ongoing, habitual action, and it's a command. Do this — not once, do this. It's a rhythm. It's a pattern. James is calling for a community rhythm of mutual, ongoing acknowledgment of our struggle with sin. This is not a transaction, it's a practice. It's not an event, but a habit.

And I just don't think that sounds much like the American church, to our detriment. We get stuck playing these games, pretending, wearing our masks, hiding, and nothing ever changes. Because we're not taking advantage of the grace, the gift that God has given us to confess our sins one to another — to stop pretending, to stop playing the game, to stop acting like we can figure this out by ourselves — but to choose to fully participate in the community life that God has called us to, that God has freely given us in Jesus, and to experience the freedom that comes through the means that God has ordained, through confessing to one another, through praying for one another. James is saying that the church should be a community that confesses to each other and prays for each other because there is a healing that comes from communal confession.

Now, let me be clear, and I've intimated as much in the last few sermons. This is not a call to just find any person in the church and spiritually spew on them. You know what I mean? It's like, hey, how are you doing? We hav—

Sometimes it can do great damage to confess your sin to the wrong person in the wrong way at the wrong time, but we don't get to use that as an excuse not to do it. Just because there might be wrong people to confess to doesn't mean that there aren't right people that you want to confess to. If you're sick, he says, call the elders. Call those that have been recognized in the church community as walking with God. Start there.

Look for people that understand, but there's another little hint in there. He says, the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. The word there for righteous is a great word in the Greek, dekaios. Again, if we only think of righteousness through a judicial crime lens, we're missing the fullness of what righteousness is. A more developed reading and understanding of righteousness acknowledges both the objective and the subjective reality of sin and forgiveness and the spiritual health that is destroyed by sin and given through confession.

So he says that the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. He's not saying that the righteous person is the person that has never sinned, that has never struggled, because as far as I know and as far as the Scripture teaches, there's only been one that ever meets that description. So he's not saying, go find the perfect person. Go find the sinless person. Go find the person that doesn't struggle with sin. That's not what he's saying. It can't mean that.

What he's saying is though, there are people that have been walking with God, and in their walking with God, they've been healed. They've experienced some freedom. They've been set free. Those are the people that you want to go to and confess to. Those are the people that you want to listen to and pray with. Those are the ones that have tasted and seen what God offers. See, the wrong person will judge you. The righteous person will love you. The wrong person will talk about you to others, while the righteous person will talk to God about you and on your behalf. The wrong person will run from you. The righteous person will remain steadfast. They will abide.

The right person, the righteous person, is not a perfect person, but rather is someone with a quality of life with God. A person that has themselves fallen, and they know what it means to receive grace from God. This may sound harsh, but I often say, I don't really trust anyone that hasn't failed. The reality is we've all failed, but people that think they haven't failed — that's a whole different ballgame. When he says, find a righteous person to pray for you, he's not saying find somebody that's perfect and has it all together. No, no — find somebody that God has done an amazing work in their life, because they know what it's about.

He continues and goes to Elijah. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. Elijah was a prophet, so he had a nature like ours, but he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months, it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and heaven gave rain and the earth bore its fruit. And then James says, my brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back — it almost feels like maybe James has taken a hard right or a hard left here, but he's not. This is all connected. It's all in the call to uncover our sin with each other and bring it to God.

He says, listen, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and cover over a multitude of sins. James ends with something we're seeing. The person who goes after the wanderer — and he doesn't say the elder, he doesn't say the pastor, he doesn't say the apostle. He says, if someone, if someone in the community sees another in the community that is struggling, that is suffering, and they reach out, they can change reality for that person.

That's been my story. I know there are countless others in this room. It's not a pastor. It's not a program. It's a member of the family — someone who noticed, and somebody who loves enough that they choose to reach out. The community that confesses produces the person capable of the rescue. A church community that has that kind of real vulnerability and shared acknowledgement of our sin and our need for God — it's that kind of community that produces righteous people that have the ability to see and reach out and rescue. That person exists because someone somewhere first opened their hand. I like to think of confession that way — of just releasing and opening.

It's a stupid illustration, and it's probably one that's overused, but since ancient times, people have been catching animals and monkeys with a very simple trap. You just need a narrow-necked bottle and some fruit, and the monkey will reach its hand in and grab the fruit, and the moment he grabs the fruit, he can't pull his hand through the narrow neck. All he has to do to be free is let go of the fruit. That's all he has to do — let go — and yet people on every continent throughout centuries have been trapping monkeys with this simple method because they won't let go.

I think it's a tragic but apt description of where so many of us find ourselves with our sin. We just won't let go, and it's killing us. It's hurting us. It's damaging us, and it's time to open the hand. Sometimes it's our hand that needs to be open, and sometimes we get the joy and privilege of helping others open the hand, but either way, freedom and life comes.

The problem with sin is so much worse than what we think it is. It doesn't only separate — it destroys us from the inside out. Sin silences us, it darkens us, it shrinks us, and the more we hold on to it, the more damage it does. And maybe the worst part is that we're doing it to ourselves. Maybe it's time to let go. Maybe it's time to take our hand out of the jar. Maybe it's time to lift it to God so that He can cover what we've been unable to cover.

The call this morning is to let go of the things that are killing you. Open your hand. And one of the most profound ways that you can do that will be to simply confess that to another person who is walking and following Jesus. I can't explain it, but I've experienced it so profoundly. The simple act of saying it out loud to another brother and sister in Christ doesn't change anything of the circumstances, but changes everything of the experience. Therefore, brothers and sisters, confess your sins one to another — not as an act of obligation, not as a burden or a duty, but as the gracious gift of God to bring you the freedom that God wants for you and that our hearts cry for.

This is not an assignment. It's an invitation. And I won't promise that the moment you do, all your struggles with sin go away — let's just be honest about that. This is not a magic pill. It's not an easy button. It's not how it works. But the freedom that confession opens is real. It begins the slow, gradual process of restoring and healing all that sin has distorted and broken.

This is what David is describing in Psalm 32. It's not a transaction or a turning. What he says is on the other side of it is worth everything — being blessed, being free, not merely being forgiven, but being blessed, having a right relationship with the God who made us for Himself. Not hiding, not managing, not ignoring or justifying our sin, but owning it and letting God do what only He can do, which is cover it.

You won't arrive there today, but you can start today. The beginning is guaranteed to matter, because the God who called Adam out of the bushes, the God who met David on the other side of his silence, is the same God who is waiting for you to bring it to Him. Amen.