WHENEVER SOMEONE IN our community is in trouble, what do the people of God do?

First and foremost, we pray.

That’s not all we do, of course. As John himself has said, when we see a brother or sister in need and have the means, we should help, because love needs to go beyond mere words to loving action (1 John 3:17-18). We can help people financially, for example, but we can also visit them in the hospital. When there’s a crisis, we can help make sure the family has food to eat and the kids get picked up from school. We can drive people to doctor appointments. We can keep them company and be a quiet, comforting presence when they grieve.

All of these things and more are practical ways to embody the love of Jesus to one another, to live out the commandment of Jesus to love. But in, through, and alongside all of this, we pray.

My wife is the one who manages the prayer requests for our fellowship group. Anyone who has a need sends her an email, and she forwards it to everyone else. At our age, most of the requests are health-related. Some have to do with relationships or losses of various kinds.

No one, however, sends a prayer request about sin. No one ever says, “I’m struggling with this particular sin in my life. Please ask everyone to pray for me.” That kind of vulnerability is reserved for only the closest and safest of relationships, and maybe not even then.

But of course we may still see sin in each other’s lives, even if we don’t ask each other to pray about it. So do we, should we pray for people when we see them sin? John seems to think so:

If you see any brother or sister commit a sin that does not lead to death, you should pray and God will give them life. I refer to those whose sin does not lead to death. There is a sin that leads to death. I am not saying that you should pray about that. All wrongdoing is sin, and there is sin that does not lead to death. (1 John 5:16-17, NIV)

I would imagine that most people, when they read this passage, immediately want to know, “What is this sin that leads to death?” And lingering behind that question may be a further, more anxious one: “Have I committed it?”

As you might guess, a number of possibilities have been suggested through the years for this fatal sin, such as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (see Mark 3:28-30). But John may not have a specific sinful behavior in mind. Where the New International Version translates John as saying, “There is a sin that leads to death,” a more literal translation would be “There is sin to death”; for you grammarians out there, there is no indefinite article.

In other words, I doubt that John is saying, “Out of all the ways one might sin or do wrong, there’s one in particular that God thinks is so terrible that you’re dead meat no matter what.” Rather, he seems to be making a distinction between two kinds of sin: one kind leads to death and the other does not. Pastorally, he is telling his readers to pray for any fellow believer whom they see committing a sin — but only if it’s the kind that doesn’t lead to death. Note, though, that he doesn’t forbid them from praying for someone who commits the deadly kind of sin. He’s just not requiring them to do so.

If we assume that these verses aren’t random thoughts that are simply bubbling up as he brings the letter to a close, then several things would make sense in context. First, his concern continues to be pastoral. As he has been doing throughout the letter, he is caring for the spiritual state of his readers, strengthening their confidence and the fellowship between them. That may be why he doesn’t tell them to pray for those who commit sins leading to death: he is assuming that his readers do not sin in this way, and is limiting his comments to how they should care for one another.

Second, by implication, when he speaks of the kind of sin that leads to death, he is probably thinking of those who refused to believe the truth about Jesus and left the community. We’ve seen repeatedly how John makes black-and-white distinctions between those who stayed and those who left: light versus darkness, for example, or truth versus lies. And just a few verses earlier, John declared that “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” John’s mention of death here is probably another way to speak of those who don’t have eternal life — namely, the secessionists, who don’t have the Son of God.

Third, remember what John said in the two verses that came just before these:

This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him. (1 John 5:14-15)

What kind of prayer does John have in mind? A reasonable possibility is that it’s the prayer he immediately goes on to describe in the verses we’re looking at now. The confidence of which he speaks in verse 14 is not that they can have anything they want for themselves, if only they ask and it’s within God’s will. Rather, he wants them to know that eternal life already is God’s will for everyone who believes in Jesus as they have — and if they happen to see a brother or sister going off the rails and lovingly pray for them, that too is a prayer in accordance with God’s will that he will hear and answer.

But fourth and finally, what does it mean to pray for eternal life for those who are already believers, for those who supposedly already have eternal life? Here, we probably shouldn’t think of eternal life as something that will only happen in the future, after we die. Eternal life is not just quantity of life, but quality. When his readers pray about a particular brother’s sin, for example — a sin that doesn’t lead to death! — they needn’t worry that his eternal destiny is at stake. Their concern is for the quality of his life and witness in the present.

Here, therefore, is a possible reconstruction of John’s meaning and intent:

• The secessionists were those who had committed sins leading to death. They refused to believe the truth about Jesus, and therefore cut themselves off from the only source of eternal life.
• Some of those who clung to the apostolic teaching and remained in the community may nevertheless have been affected in some way by the secessionists’ teaching and example. John suggests that the secessionists lived sinful lives; had some of that bad behavior rubbed off on some of his readers? It’s reasonable to suppose that the community didn’t split cleanly into two camps; there would likely have been people on the fence in their belief or behavior.
• That would no doubt have been a cause of great concern among the brothers and sisters. The people in question hadn’t gone completely over to the Dark Side, but they were flirting with the grey. Pray for them, John says. Do so with the confidence of knowing that God wants them to live a full and faithful Christian life, the “abundant life” that Jesus wanted for all his followers (John 10:10). And do so with the reassurance that this is not a sin that leads to death, because unlike those who left, they do in fact have the Son of God.

As with so much in John’s letter, there is no way to be sure if such a reconstruction is correct, and others have suggested alternative readings. But whatever the interpretation, I think it wise to avoid getting lost in trying to identify what is and isn’t a sin that leads to death. John’s primary purpose is to call the community to prayer; we should pray for the spiritual health and vitality of our brothers and sisters.