The Terrible Mistake of Starting Prayer with Confession

The following quotation was taken from a helpful interview (listen to this 27 minute interview!) of New Frontiers leader Terry Virgo by Mike Reeves:

Some people say when you start to pray begin confessing your sin to clear the decks. I think that’s a terrible mistake because once I get sin-centered when I pray I think the devil is standing just behind me…I think the Devil would say “how’d you do this? how’d you do that?” and so you know you just get more and more oppressed by failure.

We need forgiveness. But if we start with sin, it might sound good because it clears the decks, but I find it clutters me up. I want to come aware of my Father. Aware of how good he is. How kind. How gracious. I’ll use the Lord Prayer as a kind of structure. I’ll go through it as a kind of headings. But I start God-conscious. Start thankful. I just find that warms my heart.

Terry frames this idea with Psalm 100:4 where the Psalmist writes:

Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name.

Another encouraging text that I find gives a biblical framework for this is found in Ephesian 3:11-12, where Paul writes,

This was according to the eternal purpose that [God the Father] has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.

Boldness and confidence in prayer starts with the Father’s eternal purpose of grace realized in the person and work of Jesus. It starts with something God has done for you, not something you have done or not done for God. By all means, we should confess sin while we pray, but start with thankfulness and praise in what God has done–not what you have done.

A Tenderhearted Man

Tenderhearted.

The week of my 33rd birthday, now just a few weeks past, I felt particularly drawn to this phrase. In fact, I believe this year, I am to pray, in the power of the Spirit, this reality into myself and into my family.

No one becomes tenderhearted without prayer, because being a tenderhearted person is impossible. It is the work of the Holy Spirit. Soft hearts are not made by men, they are born by God through the new birth. And being created by the Spirit they can only be cultivated by the Spirit as well.

We hear from history of lionhearted men, but not often do we hear of tenderhearted men

The Greek Lexicon’s define tenderheartedness as compassionate. In Greek medicine tenderheartedness referred to having healthy bowels, which exposes the utterly personal inner-ness and surety of being externalized background for the word. Ray Ortlund spoke of it in this way: “It seems inescapable that this word describes a certain emotional tone, a softness of disposition, a heart that feels for others.” Tenderheartedness demands emotion, as it is not a cognitive attribute, but lies at the core of one’s heart and visibly overflows to others. In the New Testament the word is used twice demonstrating that a tenderhearted man is a kind, forgiving (Eph. 4:32), and humble man (1 Pe. 3:8).

Defining it is difficult, living it is harder, but it can only be properly defined by being lived. Therefore its easiest to point to a person. We hear from history of lionhearted men, but not often do we hear of tenderhearted men. Yet there was One.

The ultimate man of the tender-heart was Jesus. If King Richard of England had the lionheart, King Jesus had the tenderheart. Compassion was Jesus’ most distinct emotion in his earthly ministry, and forgiveness thundered from the cross louder than the hammered nails that hung him there. Humility characterized everything he did, as he came from the glory of heaven to the sin-cursed earth to serve and save sin-filled humanity. Jesus embodies and models the man of the tenderheart.

Being a hard man is easy. Sometimes the fact that life is hard, work is frustrating, marriage is difficult, and death is coming causes hardness to callous the heart. But this is not as it should be. Life, marriage, family, work, and death when shaped by the Spirit can make soft-light-tender-hearted men.

Using the example of marriage, Jesus himself said that the reason why marriage is hard and divorce exists is because the men that get married are hard-hearted (Mt. 19:8). Therefore marriage is a perfect place to find that you are not naturally tenderhearted, and when redeemed by Jesus is an ideal place to cultivate softheartedness. One of the reason marriage exists is to make men’s hearts soft and tender not hard and harsh.

This is what I strive to be in every area of my life. Being a man is a call to be soft, pliable and tender or to say it differently humble, forgiving, and compassionate. May God raise up more men in the church that when dead have the following listed on their tombstone:

Here lies ____________ the tenderhearted.

Experiencing Jesus-Sized Joy

In Jesus’ prayer to his Father in John 17, he makes a connection between the things he says and the joy of those who trust him.

“…these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves.” (Jn. 17:13)

Strikingly, he prays that believers will experience his own joy. Jesus’ desire is that his followers have Jesus-sized joy, and his words are instrumental to their own experience of his joy. Whether or not the ‘these things’ Jesus are referring to is the whole Farewell Discourse (Jn. 14-17) or this prayer itself (Jn. 17), the aim of Jesus’ words is to bring his followers into joy.

Jesus’ desire is that his followers have Jesus-sized joy, and his words are instrumental to their own experience of his joy.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones gives some practical suggestions to how believers may have this joy. He states,

There are many Christian people who spend the whole of their lives looking at their own feelings and always taking their own spiritual pulse, their own spiritual temperature. Of course, they never find it satisfactory, and because of that they are miserable and unhappy, moaning and groaning. Now that is wrong. First and foremost we must avoid concentrating on our own feelings. We must learn to concentrate positively on ‘these things’. In other words, the secret of joy is the practice of meditation–that is the way to have this joy of the Lord. We must meditate upon him, upon what he is, what he has done, his love to us and upon God’s care for us who are his people. The Assurance of Salvation, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000), 305-306.

Vacation, Sabbath, and Guest Bloggers

Since I’m heading for some much needed vacation with the fam, I thought a few comments on Sabbath and rest were in order. I know Sabbath is biblical and necessary because even God rested and because he commands it and gave it as a gift for those made in his image, but I still haven’t got down exactly how this practically works.

We would play and we would pray.

Do you just watch TV? Do you go on a walk in the woods? Do you pray all day? Do you write? Do you eat an overwhelming amount of donuts? A mix of all 5? I’m not sure, but I thought Eugene Peterson’s comments regarding this topic in an 2005 interview were helpful:

We defined our Sabbath this way: we could do anything, but nothing that was necessary. We would play and we would pray. Anything under the category of play was legitimate; anything in the category of pray was legitimate.

So, pray and play. That sounds good.

I also plan on doing some life-planning, but most of all I want to hang with my wife, baby boy still enwombed, toddler-baby Grace, the Trinity, and enjoy books, sun, and beach.

The blog will still have posts periodically, as I have some guest bloggers who have kindly agreed to do some postings while I’m gone. So do check in from time to time the next couple weeks.

Another Jaw-Dropping Purpose of John 17

John 17 is one of the most mind-blowing chapters in the Bible. The reader gets a snapshot of the intimate relationship between Jesus and his Father. However, that is not the only purpose of the prayer in this passage, D. A. Carson points out another:

“This prayer demonstrates the depth of Jesus’ communion with his Father, and this constitutes a paradigm for the intimate relationship with the Father that the disciples themselves will come to enjoy.” The Gospel According to John, PNTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 564

I mentioned in a previous post that believer’s are invited into a measure of the kind of relationship that Jesus has with his Father, and John 17 functions as a paradigm as to what that can look like. Yes, be amazed at God the Son and God the Father’s joyful eternal relationship, but don’t stop there. Discover the jaw-dropping truth that those who trust Jesus are invited to enjoy that kind of experience and communion with the Father.

Stunning.

Evil Men, Moralism, Hate, & Prayer

In light of the killing of Osama Bin Laden and thinking about the Christian response to it, evil men in general, and evil itself, I thought some meditations from Eugene Peterson on prayer and the imprecatory Psalms would be helpful:

We have been brought up, most of us, interpreting what is wrong in the world on a grid of moralism. Moralism trains us in making cool, detached judgments. Deep down, the moralist suspects that there are no, or at least not very many, real victims. People get what is coming to them. In the long run people reap what they sow. The rape victim, the unemployed, the emotionally ill, the prisoner, the refugee–if we were privy to all the details we would see that, in fact, ‘they asked for it.’

The Psalms will have none of this. The Psalms assume a moral structure to life, but their main work is not to train us in judgmental moralism but to grapple with evil. Their praying insights have identified an enemy and they respond in outrage. They hate what they see. On behalf of all the dispossessed, the mocked, the dehumanized of the earth they pour into the ears of God their sightings of the enemy, not ‘siphoning off hate, but channeling it in effective ways, in covenantal shapes.’

This hate arised in a context of holiness: meditating on the holy word of God, expecting the holy messiah of God…immersed by prayer in this holiness, we see clearly what we never saw before, the utter and terrible sacrilege of enemies who violate the good of creation, who brutalize women and men who are made, every one them in the image of God. There is an enormous amount of suffering epidemic in the world because of evil people. The rape and pillage are so well concealed in polite language and courteous conventions that some people can go years without seeing it. And we ourselves do not see it. But now we see it. And we hate it. We are rejected from our cushioned private religion into solidarity with ‘the Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed up.’

Just as hurt is the usual human experience that brings us to our knees praying for help, provoking the realization that we need God, so hate is frequently the human experience that brings us to our feet praying for justice, catalyzing our concern for the terrible violations against life all around us. Hate is often the first sign that we care. If we are far gone in complacency, it is the only emotion with enough velocity to penetrate our protective smugness and draw red blood. That does not mean that prayer legitimizes hate–it uses it. ‘Surely the wrath of men shall praise thee’ (Psalm 76:10)…

It is easy to be honest before God with our hallelujahs; it is somewhat more difficult to be honest in our hurts; it is nearly impossible to be honest before God in the dark emotions of our hate…We must pray who we actually are, not who we think we should be. In prayer, all is not sweetness and light. The way of prayer is not to cover our unlovely emotions that they will appear respectable, but expose them so that they can be enlisted in the work of the kingdom…Hate, prayed, takes our lives to bedrock where the foundations of justice are being laid.” [Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1989), 99, 100, 101.]

God at the Command of Prayer?

Always stood in wonder at how Jonathan Edwards, the great Calvinistic mind and the great revivalist, could speak of prayer in such a fashion:

“God is, if I may so say, at the command of the prayer of faith; and in this respect is, as it were, under the power of his people; as princes, they have power with God, and prevail.”  [Some Thoughts Concerning The Present Revival of Religion..., The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1834), 426]

May God keep me and keep the church from the kind of view of God’s sovereignty that discourages relentless prayer and laying hold upon God to act.

It is possible, and, I think, it is most biblical to believe that God sovereignly wills everything (and I mean everything), and to pray in such a way and with the kind of faith that prevails with God.

May God make me such a man.

God’s Compassion & Divine Healing

Jack Deere writes,

Understanding Christ’s compassion for the sick and hurting has great practical ramifications. I frequently meet people who are enthusiastic about praying for the sick…Often their primary motivation in praying for the sick is to see something exciting, something supernatural, or to prove their theological opponents that God does heal after all.

These are not New Testament motivations for healing. God is not in the business of gratifying our desires for excitement nor in helping some of his children win arguments over others. He is in the compassion business. To the degree that you can enter into his compassion for the sick and for the hurting, you can be a vessel through whom the healing power of Jesus can flow. If you really want to be used in a healing ministry, ask your heavenly Father to let you feel his compassion for the hurting.

To argue that Jesus has withdrawn his healing ministry from the church today is to argue that he has also withdrawn his compassion from the church. But if we believe in a compassionate Savior, we ought to have confidence in his desire to heal in the church today. (Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, 120, 121)

 

The Shockingly Bold Prayer of Jeremiah

The prayer of Jeremiah in Jeremiah 20:7 is shocking…even disturbing:

O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me.

Eugene Peterson writes,

Jeremiah was not timid in his prayers…A blunt rendering [of Jer. 20:7] is “First you seduced me, then you raped me.” You lured me by enticing words, then you seized me by force and made me submit to your will. Our anger can be a measure of our faith. Believers argue with God; skeptics argue with each other.

This is Jeremiah at prayer: scared, lonely, hurt, angry. A surprise? The indomitable Jeremiah praying like that? All of us experience these things. No one alive is a stranger to them. But do we pray them? Jeremiah prayed them. Everything he experienced and thought he set in relationship to a living, knowing, saving God. And the moment these things are set in relationship to God something begins to happen.  (Run With the Horses, 100-101)

A Prayer for A Deep Sense of the Gospel

Henry Scougal, the Professor of Divinity at Aberdeen University who died in 1657 at age 27, penned the following prayer at the end of his classic book The Life of God in the Soul of Man:

“Fill our souls with such a deep sense, and full persuasion of those great truths which thou has revealed in the gospel, as may influence and regulate our whole conversation, and that the life which we henceforth live in the flesh, we may live through faith in the Son of God.” (p. 134)

Notice the prayer is not merely for persuasion of the truth of the Gospel, but for a deep sense of that persuasion.

Pray for your own heart, that you not only know the Gospel, but feel the Gospel.  Then pray the same for others.