Craig T. Owens

If anyone sees his brother commit a sin…he should pray…. (1 John 5:16)

The King James Version says this a little more poetically, “If any man see his brother sin a sin.” The Greek does not have the indefinite “a” in front of sin, and the verb tense makes this an ongoing process, so it’s probably more accurate to say it like this: “If anyone sees his brother sinning sins.”

The apostle John is head-over-heels in love with Jesus. So time and time again his counsel is for us also to fall more in love with God, and to demonstrate this by loving others. There is no more loving thing we can do for someone sinning sins than to pray for them (see also Galatians 6:1 and James 5:19-20).

John doesn’t ask us to catalogue their sins; otherwise he would have said “a sin” or even “their sinS.” We are not to be the sin police trying to document each and every infraction! Instead, when we see a brother or sister with a lifestyle that is separated from the love of God, we need to pray for them.

I think John might ask us to pray that they would see the love of God so clearly that the love of sin would become cold and pale and unattractive.