Are You Confessed Up To Date?

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 
 
When I was in my first year of seminary, a missionary named Bertha Smith spoke to a class I was in. She was a godly woman who had given her life for ministry. As she stood before our class, she looked through her glasses at us and said, “Boys, are your sins confessed up to date?” I thought to myself, “I surely think so.”  
 
That afternoon, I got alone with the Lord, and I said, “Jesus, I want to be very specific with you. I want you to have total access to my heart and my life. Is there anything that I have said, anything that I have done, anything that I am thinking that is interfering with my relationship with you? Lord, would you reveal to me any sin specifically in my heart and in my life that I haven't confessed?”  
 
I began to wait. I had a legal pad in front of me and I didn't think I would need much space. By the time the Holy Spirit stopped speaking to me, I had the front and back of the page full of specific things that I had overlooked. These things were breaking the heart of God and clogging my spiritual pipeline.  
 
Let me ask you a question. When was the last time you got serious enough with God to spend time with Him to do that? So often we don't make the time to go through an exercise like this because we may not want to hear those things. Sometimes, we’ve filed away in our mind things that we have said and things that we have done. We forget about those things, brush them off, and say it's no big deal. But it is still a big deal to God!  
 
So with all of this in mind, I want to encourage you to spend time alone with God and make sure there is no personal sin that you are harboring. If you are allowing personal sin to stay there, anger that you have justified, words you have said (although you meant it in humor), unforgiveness you’ve held onto, your prayer life will be ineffective.   
 
If you have not dealt with the sin you have committed against someone, unless you deal with that, it will hinder your prayer life. Your family needs your prayers. Your friends need your prayers. Your circle of influence needs your prayers, but you will disqualify yourself from being on the field to make the block for them spiritually if you are not confessed up to date.