Our church’s worship could be called liturgical. We issue a call to worship, join in a confession, and hear the words of assurance. We respond to each of these elements with praise, gratitude or dedication, in words that are both spoken and sung. Then, when we hear the Scripture read, we give thanks to God.

People are not crowding into our building to say, “Thanks be to God!” or to confess their sins. It is possible that we would draw more people if we’d drop the confession of sin and buy a haze machine instead. (Though I can imagine future church members, say twenty years from now, saying, “Can you believe we used to think that was cool?”) We’ll forego the haze machine for now, but we will keep the confession, which in our liturgy is not just a confession of sin, but a confession of need, and especially a confession of Jesus as Lord.

Nearly everyone agrees that confession of sin is a biblical imperative. So, why is it missing from most evangelical church services—the ecclesial tradition that is most emphatic in its insistence on being biblical? I was in a mainline church recently where we were called on to confess our sins, but in the last big evangelical gathering I was at, a confession of sin would have felt out of place. Just as we were being lifted up on wave after wave of music and image, a confession would have brought us down.

If we don’t give confession a place in our corporate worship, will we give it a place in our private lives? I’m not sure that we do. Yet the biblical injunction is as plain as day: “Confess your sins to one another” (James 5:16). James does not say, “Confess your sins to a therapist,” or even, “Confess your sins to a religious professional.” He says, “Confess your sins to one another.”

Why would anyone do that? They wouldn’t … unless they really wanted to get free of their sins. I am only going to confess my sins to someone if I am desperate to escape them.

But isn’t it enough to confess my sin to God? How does it help to confess my sin to someone else? It’s not like I don’t know what my sin is. In King David’s words, “My sin is always before me.”

Confession helps in more than one way. For example, though I think I know what my sin is, I might be mistaken. I may think that my weakness is sin. (It is not.) I might classify my failure as sin. (It is not.) I might believe that my feelings are a sin. (They are not.) What my sin really is, I may not see at all.

I washed windows at our house this week. We have two picture windows in our living room, one facing east and the other, larger one, facing south. In late morning (which was when I was working on them) the sun shines on both windows. On a bright, clear day (like this past Monday) it can be almost blinding.

I spent a long time making that east window just so, but when I went inside, I could see all kinds of streaks and smudges that were completely invisible from the outside. When I was finished with both windows, my wife came into the room and pointed out fresh spots that needed cleaning, one after another, after another, until I finally asked her to stop looking. The windows were good enough. (Besides, I knew that in another hour, when the sun had westered a little more, they would look spotless.)

What spots and smudges I could see depended on the direction the light was shining and on the direction from which I was looking. It is that way with sin. From within my own body, looking out of my own eyes, I can appear spotless—or at least “good enough.” But I do not see myself as I really am. For that, I need your eyes, and especially God’s eyes.

Confessing our sin to another is a great help in breaking the power that sin has over us. There is a psychological component at play here, but I don’t think the effect is merely psychological. Hidden sin is strong and will probably get stronger, but confessing sin takes away its power and hands it over to us. When we confess, sin’s hold on us weakens.

A liturgical confession is not meant to be a substitute for the confession we read about in James 5:16, but a help to it. When we corporately confess our sin and need, as well as Jesus’s lordship, we are stepping onto a path that leads straight into everyday life. Facing our sin in corporate worship helps us face it in daily life, instead of retreating into denial (1 John 1:10). The shared confession we speak publicly makes it easier to share a confession privately. And that makes it easier for me to become the joyful person God designed me to be.