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ReVision

Confession of Sin

Without this, no audience for your prayers.

The Preconditions of Prayer (2)

If I regard iniquity in my heart,
The Lord will not hear.
Psalm 66.18

Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened,
That it cannot save;
Nor His ear heavy,
That it cannot hear.
But your iniquities have separated you from your God;
And your sins have hidden
His face from you,
So that He will not hear.
Isaiah 59.1, 2

Eyes too pure
Shockingly, the prophet Habakkuk declared that God is of purer eyes than to behold evil (Hab. 1.13). He insisted that God “cannot look on wickedness.” The reason for this is simple: God hates sin (Ps. 45.7; 101.3; 119.104). He commands His people to hate sin (Ps. 97.10), and insists that one cannot fear God without also hating evil (Prov. 8.13). God hates sin, and He commands us to hate it, because sin is antithetical to everything God is, and all His good and perfect will for His creatures.

Sin challenges and denies the authority of God. Sin prefers lies to the truth, self-indulgence to true worship, the ways of the world to life in the Spirit, and the follies of the flesh to the glory of God. Sin corrupts and degrades all that God has made holy and good. Sin wounds and corrodes what God intends for health and goodness. Sin is so awful in the sight of God that He will turn His face away from it. He will not commune with it, not grant it audience, not allow it any space to assert itself. This is why Jesus’ characteristic response to the presence of demons, especially those which sought to speak to Him, was simply, “Shut up and get out!”

God hates sin, and if we think we can come to God in prayer, even if we insist that we believe in Jesus and want to be more like Him, yet be harboring sin in our lives, we will gain no access to the Father in prayer. If we cherish sin in our hearts, God will not hear our prayers. It’s not that He can’t, as if He were lacking in power, it’s rather that He won’t, because He hides His face from the very presence of sin, and refuses to hear us when we pray.

No hope?
What hope do we have, then, of ever having our prayers come before the Father? For we, like Isaiah, are sinful people, and we dwell in the midst of sinful people (Is. 6.1-6). A law of sin operates within us, even in those who have been redeemed and saved in Jesus (Rom. 7.14-23), so that if we say we have no sin, then we are simply lying to ourselves and making God to be a liar, for He insists that all have sinned and fallen short of His glory (1 Jn. 1.8, 10; Rom. 3.23).

Wretched people that we are! Who can deliver us from our sin into the presence of our heavenly Father, so that we may find mercy and grace to help in our time of need?

Our holy hope for access to and audience with God is through our Lord Jesus Christ. As we hope in Him we may be assured that His blood is sufficient to pay for all our sins. And this hope can lead us to confess our sins to God as the second precondition for His hearing our prayers and granting us mercy and grace to help in our time of need.

Confession
But what is confession?

Briefly, to confess is simply to agree with God that we are sinners, and to agree with the Holy Spirit concerning whatever specific sins He may convict us of at any moment. The Greek word for confess means literally, to say the same thing. The Holy Spirit has come to dwell in the hearts of all who believe, and one of His primary duties there is to convict us of sin (Jn. 16.8). We are convicted of sin when, as we wait on the Lord in the anteroom of prayer, we ask the Spirit to search our minds, hearts, consciences, words, and deeds, so that He may discover in us any thoughts, affections, priorities, or deeds – whether of commission or omission – that may hinder our prayers. Then, when these are brought to light, we agree with the Lord and His Word that these are wrong, that they are contrary to God’s will for us, detrimental to our walk with Him, and a hindrance to our prayers. We express contempt for these sins, thus mirroring our Father’s attitude toward them, claim the forgiveness of which we are assured in our Lord Jesus Christ, and resolve before the Father to take a new course in life, one more consistent with how the Lord Himself would walk (1 Jn. 2.1-6).

In His mercy, God will renew us in His forgiveness, refresh our spirits in His presence, and receive us as His children, so that we may in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, make our requests known to Him.

Faith is the key to the anteroom of prayer, where, in the company of God’s Spirit, we divest ourselves of all our sins, and are clothed anew in the righteousness of Jesus, so that we may come boldly and confidently before the throne of grace.

For reflection
1.  Both Paul and John indicate that the knowledge of sin comes through the Law of God (Rom. 7.7; 1 Jn. 3.4). Do you think it would be helpful, in making us sensitive to sin, if we meditated on the Law of God (cf. Ps. 1)? Explain.

2.  Meditate on the promise of 1 Jn. 1.8, 9. If we confess all the sins we know about, what does God promise concerning those we have failed to note?

3.  What is repentance? Can we truly confess a sin without also repenting of it? Explain.

Next steps – Preparation: How should confession work in your times of prayer? What might signal you, during the day, that you need to confess some sin?

T. M. Moore

Each of our “next steps” exercises is tied into goals and disciplines involved in working your Personal Mission Field. If you have not yet identified your Personal Mission Field, watch the brief video showing you how to get started right away (click here). Learn how to work your Personal Mission Field by finding a friend and signing-up for our Mission Partners Outreach.

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Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

T.M. Moore

T. M. Moore is principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He and his wife, Susie, make their home in the Champlain Valley of Vermont.
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