Lifestyle

How to Develop a Powerful Prayer Life, Part Three

Two weeks ago we began a spiritual journey together that we are calling, “A Season of Prayer.” During our Season of Prayer, I’m bringing you weekly messages on the subject of prayer, we’ve begun a new class on prayer that is meeting on Sunday evenings, we’ve been meeting on Friday nights to pray together as a church family and most of us have made a commitment to spend at least 10 minutes per day in private, personal prayer guided by the daily prayer guides that I’ve written. And the feedback that I’ve been receiving from you has been very positive. God is doing some great things in our individual lives and in our life together as a church family.

When we started this journey, I quickly realized that our progress would not be unimpeded. I realized that each of us would encounter various roadblocks along the way that could easily stop us in our tracks or throw us off course. And I knew this was going to happen because while God is delighted with our growing prayer life, Satan is not. And he’s smart enough to take advantage of every weakness that he can find in us. And it almost happened to me just this week. Here’s what happened.
The car that we bought for Jordan’s college years had begun to take a significant bite out of our budget with some major repair bills. The most recent expense came in the last couple of weeks of this school year when the transmission went out just weeks after the warranty for the previous transmission I put in it had expired. So, I got the car to the mechanic, paid him $1500 up front to rebuild the transmission and told him to call me when it was fixed and I would fly down to Southern California, pick it up and drive it back to Petaluma.

Well, the call came a few days ago. “The car is fixed and sitting in your dad’s driveway.” So, last Sunday evening I flew down to So Cal to drive the car to Petaluma on Monday, Memorial Day. I landed at the Long Beach airport, took a cab to my dad’s house, we jumped into Jordan’s car to g0 out to dinner and immediately realized that the transmission was not fixed. Every time it changed gears it bucked like a bronco. And my blood pressure and anger began to rise…and rise…and rise some more. So Monday morning, I went back to the airport and flew back home without the car…and, without the $400 I had prior to making this useless trip.

Since the repair shop was closed for Memorial Day I had to wait until Tuesday to call them. But when Tuesday came, I was ready. I woke up early Tuesday morning, hopped into the shower and began to rehearse the conversation I would soon be having with the mechanic. I played that conversation in my mind over and over and with each new version the expression of my anger became more and more heated and what remained of the mechanic after our conversation became more and more charred.

And then an interesting thing happened. I suddenly remembered that just 9 days earlier, on that Sunday morning when we kicked off our Season of Prayer, I stood right here in front of all of you and told you how I begin every day with a joyful time of praise and worship with God in my shower. How every morning, I step into the shower and immediately my mind is drawn to God and I begin to lift prayers and songs of praise to Him. Yet, on that morning, my mind was completely consumed with thoughts of anger, rage and retaliation. And all of a sudden I realized that a horrible thing that had just happened. And I want you to see the horrible thing that happened, because if it happened to me it can happen to you.

You see, I had an appointment, that morning, to meet with my Heavenly Father and tell Him how much I love Him and why I love Him and how grateful I am for all of His blessings. And, without even realizing what I was doing, I canceled that appointment so I could feed my anger and salivate at the prospect of verbally annihilating another person. What a disastrous decision that was.

--When I begin my day praising and worshiping God, He lights a spark of joy in my spirit that burns all day long. But that morning, all I had done was guarantee that this day would be characterized by tension, stress, anger and frustration.

--When I begin my day praising and worshiping God, I move through the entire day with a sense of God’s presence and God’s pleasure. But that morning, I had guaranteed that that day would only bring me a sense of God’s distance and disappointment.

I had an appointment with God and look what I traded it for. I stood God up so that I could feed the very worst part of me. What a tragedy. What a shame. No winners in that scenario. Everyone loses. Me. That poor mechanic. And every unfortunate person who would have crossed my path that day.

Thankfully, God broke through. While I was still in the shower, He spoke to my spirit and showed me the awful thing that I was doing. He showed me that this act of self-indulgence was nothing other than sin. Pure, unadulterated sin in all its shameful glory. And once I saw it for what it was, I confessed it to God, I asked for His forgiveness, I stopped that awful, sinful behavior and replaced it with praise. I showed up a little bit late, but I finally kept my original appointment. And God was waiting for me. And, as I began to lift my praises to Him, I sensed God’s forgiveness, I sensed His pleasure and He restored my joy.

I think there are some great prayer lessons for us to learn through my experience in The Prayer Shower.

--One of those lessons speaks to how quickly and how easily we can trade the opportunity to spend time with God for far lesser things. “God, I intended to pray this morning but I decided to sleep in, instead. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.” At the time, it seems like a fairly inconsequential thing but, in fact, it’s anything but inconsequential because, the truth is that the course of the rest of your day is greatly influenced by the way you begin your day. A few moments with God at the beginning of the day sets us on a significantly different course than the one we walk on those days when we just head out on our own. Have any of you found that to be true? I sure have.

--And there’s a second prayer lesson that we can find in my recent experience in The Prayer Shower…and this is the one that I want us to focus on this morning. It’s a lesson about the importance of confession.

If you were with us last Sunday, you’ll remember that we noted that there is more than one type of prayer. The Bible reveals that there are actually a number of different categories or types of prayers. And if our desire is to develop a powerful prayer life then it’s important for us to incorporate each of these different types of prayers into our prayer lives. Why is that important? It’s important because God uses each of these different types of prayers to accomplish distinct spiritual purposes in our lives. And that means that if we fail to incorporate any of these types or categories of prayer into our prayer lives then our relationship with God will be underdeveloped in some significant way.

So, last week, we began to identify those types of prayers, beginning with praise. And what is praise? Praise is the way we pray when the desire of our heart and the focus of our mind is worship. Praise is giving God the glory, the honor and the thanks that He deserves for who He is and how He has blessed us. It’s simply telling God how He captured your heart. And praise is a vitally important part of a powerful prayer life. In fact, I think praise should be the first focus in all of our praying. Before we do anything else, we need to take time to acknowledge the incredible blessing that it is to be in the presence of God.

But while praise is an important part of a powerful prayer life, it’s not the only part of a powerful prayer life. Having drawn ourselves into God’s presence and acknowledged that He is high and lifted up and altogether holy we need then to acknowledge that we are not. Even though we are saved, the truth is that as long as we live on this side of heaven we will struggle against a sinful nature. We are, as the hymn says, “prone to wander.”

Has anybody besides me noticed that? We are prone to wander. And, sometimes, even though we’re saved, we wander into sin. And that’s a real problem for us as Christians because we cannot bring sin into the presence of a holy God. Thankfully, God has a remedy for sin. It’s called, forgiveness. And the means by which we access God’s forgiveness is called, confession. And confession is the second type or category of prayer that is absolutely vital to a powerful prayer life.

So, what exactly is confession? Well, let me give you a good working definition. This is a practical definition that will help you see very clearly exactly what real confession…the kind of confession that brings God’s forgiveness…is all about. “Confession is saying about your sin the same thing that God says about your sin.” Now, I want you to soak on that for a while. Roll that around in your mind for a while. “Confession is saying about your sin the same thing that God says about your sin.”

So, what does God say about sin? He hates it. God is altogether holy and all sin is an abomination in His eyes. The great Christian writer Andrew Murray got it exactly right when he said that if you want to know how much God hates sin, think about this—“He preferred to see His son die, rather than that sin should reign.” Folks, God hates sin.

Why does God hate sin so much? He hates it because unconfessed sin is the one thing that separates us from Him. Now, does that mean that we lose our salvation if we sin? Absolutely not. We didn’t get saved by our own effort and we don’t stay saved by our own effort. We get saved and we stay saved by the grace of God. But the consequences of unconfessed sin in the life of a Christian are still absolutely devastating.

--Unconfessed sin shuts down the working of God’s Spirit in our lives. The Holy Spirit does not make His home in an unclean vessel.

--Unconfessed sin stifles the work that God is doing in our lives—conforming us to the image of Christ. Sin moves us in the opposite direction and keeps us moving in that direction until that sin is confessed.

--Unconfessed sin blocks the flow of God’s blessing into our lives. God’s not going to bless disobedience.

--Unconfessed sin renders our prayers impotent. James 5:16 says, “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.” Key word—righteous.

--Unconfessed sin even shuts God’s ears to our prayers. Psalm 66:18 says, “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.”

Clearly, it is not even remotely possible to have a powerful prayer life if we are not consistently, specifically and thoroughly confessing our sins. And Psalm 139:23-24 is a key scripture to help us see what real, cleansing confession looks like. It says, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

--That phrase, “See if there is any offensive way in me,” suggests that the confession of our sins needs to be very specific. The confession that brings God’s cleansing forgiveness identifies each of our sins by name.

--That phrase, “Lead me in the way everlasting,” suggests a change in behavior. If we want to experience the fullness of God’s cleansing forgiveness, it’s not enough just to identify our sins—we have to stop sinning; we need to change our behavior.

--That phrase, “Search me, O God, and know my heart,” suggests a thorough process. When you search for something, you take your time. And if we are serious about inviting God to search out our sins, we need to give Him time to complete the process. Not because God is a slow worker, but because we are reluctant to listen.
Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things…” And one of the heart’s greatest deceits is to say anything other than the truth about our sin.

--We excuse our sin. But God hates our sin.

--We justify our sin. But God hates our sin.

--We minimize our sin. But God hates our sin…just look at this Table to see how much He hates it.

So, when we invite God to search our hearts and root out our sins, we need to give Him time to break through our defenses so that we can see our sin from His perspective, identify our sins by name and say about our sins the same thing that God says about it.

“Father, I’ve been lying to you and deceiving myself by justifying and excusing my sin. But, that ends now. Father, I confess my sin and I acknowledge that is a terrible offense to You. Forgive me. Cleanse me.”

And God’s promise to us is that He will. 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

And with that forgiveness, the wall that our sin had built between ourselves and God is obliterated. God’s Spirit is once again free to work in us and God’s blessings begin to flow into us. And the first of those blessings is the lifting of a huge burden of guilt.

In a few moments we’re going to meet the Lord at this Table of Remembrance. If you know the Lord, you’re invited. But your unconfessed sins are not. Don’t bring them here to our Lord’s Table. So, let’s take a few moments to deal with them. Ask God to search your heart and reveal your sins. And once revealed, confess them…by name, ask God to forgive them and then receive anew the gift of His full, complete, cleansing forgiveness and then come and share a Supper Celebration with your Lord.