“SO YOU NEED TO COME CLEAN”
So You Think You Can Pray
March 16, 2014
Cornerstone Community Church
My one-year old granddaughter McKenzie has a number of adorable characteristics that make it easy for me to love her, but she has one trait in particular that endears her to me – she likes to clean. Now I’ll be honest – she can make quite a mess, and she can do it pretty quickly. But she has this obsession with wiping down tables that can’t help but make me proud. If we sit down in a restaurant and hand her a napkin, she’ll spend the next few minutes furiously wiping the table over and over again. And when the napkin she’s using gets too crinkled up, she’ll reach over and steal my napkin so she can clean the table some more. There’s just something in her that says, “I really need to get this table clean.”
In each one of us there is a similar urge. No, not all of us are compulsive cleaners. Some of us are much more comfortable with a messy room or a messy car than others. But there is something in our souls that won’t let us rest until we come clean with our Creator. The Bible uses the term “conscience;” that word is used 30 times in the New Testament alone. Our conscience is like a God-given moral compass. You don’t have to be a Christian to have a conscience, of course; everyone has a conscience. Listen to how the Apostle Paul describes the conscience in Romans 2:
Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them. (Romans 2:14-15)
God has written right and wrong on each of our hearts, and as Paul goes on to make so very clear in the Book of Romans, every one of us has made the decision to do what we know is wrong. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Romans 3:23 tells us. And when we do sin, our conscience lights up like a “check engine” light in our cars, alerting us to the fact that there is something quite wrong in our souls, warning us that we need to do something to correct the problem. Our conscience can act like a stone in our shoes, alerting us to the fact that we’ve stepped out of bounds, that we’ve made a moral mess that needs to be cleaned up.
But have you noticed that we have a tendency to get comfortable with our messes? For example, there was a time when everything in your office or in your bedroom had to be in perfect order. Every book had to be on its place in the bookshelf; every shirt had to be hung in its place. The bed had to be made, and all 25 decorative pillows had to be arranged just so, even if no one but you are ever around to admire the arrangement. And then, little by little, your standards relaxed a bit. Clutter became more acceptable to you. Some shirts went in the closet and some went under the bed and some were in the trunk of your car, and as long as you knew where to find them, that was just fine. The pillows? It takes a lot of effort to arrange 25 decorative pillows just so. It turns out that you’re OK with some of them being on the bed and some of them staying on the floor – at least until your mother-in-law comes over for a visit.
In fact, we’ve even discovered how to circumvent the warning lights. When the “change oil” light comes on in my car, I know how to turn it off without bothering to take it into the dealer or getting the oil changed. When the red light comes on in our refrigerator to tell us it’s time to put in a clean water filter, I’ve discovered I don’t have to actually change the filter to make the light go off – I just have to push another button.
And that’s how it sometimes works with our messy hearts. We get comfortable with the spiritual clutter that clogs up our souls. We learn how to shut off the warning signals sent out by our conscience. We choose to ignore the stone in our shoes.
But that only works for so long, and we know it. While Kelsey was in South Africa last fall we kept the Mazda 3 she drives in our driveway at home. I would take it out for a spin about once a week to make sure it would still run for her when she got back. But I noticed pretty early on that the car wasn’t starting very well. And as the weeks went by it seemed to take longer and longer for the engine to turn over. But I didn’t really feel like taking it in to the dealer. I didn’t want to take the time; I didn’t want to spend the money. I determined I would try to use the car more frequently to keep the battery charged. And then one Thursday night – my regular night to drive the Mazda around – it happened. The car wouldn’t start. Ignoring the warning signs was no longer an option. Now I had to pay attention to the problem; now I had to spend the time and the money to replace the dead battery.
And we know from past experience that it works that way with our souls. We can only ignore the warning bells for so long. There’s a limit to how much of a moral mess we can make and still be alive spiritually. And there’s only one surefire way to redress the mess – we’ve got to come clean. We need to practice the spiritual discipline of confession.
We’re in the second week of our series called “So You Think You Can Pray,” and our topic this morning is the prayer of confession. Here’s the promise of Scripture: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9) That’s what we all want. We all want to be in God’s good graces; we all want to be made clean. But there’s a prerequisite, and it’s called confession. So this morning we want to learn from some of the great men and women of the Bible how to pray a prayer of confession that gets the job done.
A Healthy Confession Begins With Reading The Bible
We watch “So You Think You Can Dance” to see how the really great dancers do what they do. They are our models. To find someone to model our prayers after, we can’t do any better than Daniel. If you remember anything about Daniel you probably remember the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. He was thrown to the lions not for stealing or cheating or doing anything morally out of line; he was thrown to the lions for praying to the God of Israel when the law of the land said such prayers were forbidden. But while that is one of the great stories of the Bible, this morning our attention is on a different prayer of Daniel’s, his prayer of confession recorded in Daniel 9. Very quickly, here’s the background of the Book of Daniel. Israel had been ruled by a variety of kings for about 400 years, and had prospered as long as it obeyed God. But a series of bad kings led Israel seriously off track, and around the year 600 B.C. the dreaded Babylonian army conquered Israel, destroyed Jerusalem and took Israel’s best and brightest youngsters – including Daniel – back to Babylon as slaves. It was a time of great suffering for God’s people.
And Daniel was understandably bothered by the suffering of the people of Israel. Why, he wondered – as we often wonder ourselves – are bad things happening to us? Why do we suffer as we do? Why did God let this happen to us? That’s what Daniel was wondering – why, if Israel was God’s chosen people, did God allow the Babylonians, a truly evil people, to conquer Israel and make slaves of them?
And then the answer came to Daniel, and I want you to notice how the answer came, because it’s the first lesson we need to learn when it comes to the prayer of confession. Here’s how Daniel 9 begins: “In the first year of [the reign of Darius], I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures, according to the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting, and in sackcloth and ashes. I prayed to the Lord my God and I confessed: Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenants of love with those who love him and keep his commandments, we have sinned and done wrong.” (Daniel 9:2-5)
Here’s the picture. Daniel is trying to figure out why God has seemingly abandoned him and his people and allowed them to become enslaved by the wicked Babylonians. So how’s he trying to figure this out? He’s reading his Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures. He’s reading Jeremiah, and he’s reading Deuteronomy. And as he reads his Bible it hits Daniel – the reason he and his people are suffering as they are is very clear. There’s no mystery to it at all. God had very specifically warned Israel long ago that if they turned their back on God that he was going to punish them. In fact God had even specifically warned Israel who was going to enslave them and for how long – the Babylonians would enslave them for 70 years. In Jeremiah 25:11 Jeremiah gave the people of Israel this very specific warning: “This whole country will become a desolate wasteland, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years.”
Suddenly it’s painfully clear to Daniel. The “check engine” light had been on for a long time. They should have seen this coming; he should have seen this coming. And now that he’s taken the time to look long and hard into the Scriptures, it’s as plain as day. So Daniel does what he knows he simply has to do – he puts on sackcloth and ashes and bows before his God to confess his people’s sins.
Now this is a fairly long prayer which we don’t have time to read in its entirety, but there are three principles we can learn from Daniel’s example. Here’s the first one – a healthy confession begins with reading the Bible.
Here’s what I’ve discovered. I’ve learned that it’s much easier for me to muffle my conscience and to minimize my moral shortcomings when I’m not consistently spending time reading my Bible. Oh, I might still know that I’m not living as I should, that I’m cutting corners spiritually, but as long as I’m not immersed in God’s Word I can sort of shrug that off. But not when I’m regularly reading and meditating on the Bible. When I read it there in black and white, straight from the heart and mind of God, there’s simply no way I can tell myself the excuses we are prone to trot out to silence our conscience: “It’s no big deal. I’m not so bad. Everybody does it.”
In a way the Bible is something like this one speed sign they have on Highway 17 as you’re heading over to Santa Cruz. Not the speed limit signs, the ones that tell you that you’re not supposed to go over 45 mph on the curves. Those have become background noise to us, if you will; we’ve learned to ignore them. We see the speed limit signs and we may or may not check our speed, but frankly we’re not slowing down no matter what the sign says. Then we come to this particular much larger sign that says this: “You are driving 60 mph.” That sign is hard to ignore. For one thing, it’s much bigger. For another thing, it’s a blinking sign. But most importantly, it’s a sign that’s personal, as if it’s pointing right at me and saying, “At this moment in time, you – my good man – are driving 15 mph over the speed limit.” That’s a sign that always prompts me to evaluate how I’m driving right then and there; that’s not a sign I can ever ignore. And when I take the time to read my Bible, God uses the Bible in much the same way. When I read what God says is right and wrong, I can’t help but stop and evaluate whether I’m tracking with what God says is best for me. Paul says it like this in 2 Timothy: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16)
Most of us have heard of the Twelve Steps that are central to so many recovery programs. What we’re talking about this morning runs parallel to Steps 4 and 5. Step 4 of the Twelve Steps is “to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” and Step 5 is “to admit to God, ourselves and others the exact nature of our wrongs.” First, make a moral inventory, and second, confess. And our first lesson in praying a prayer of confession is to be sure to use the Bible in making our searching and fearless moral inventory. It’s not particularly helpful or healthy to evaluate our lives in comparison with Justin Bieber or Toronto Mayor Rob Ford or anyone else. And it’s not always healthy to rely solely on our conscience in making our searching and fearless moral inventory, because we’ve all discovered how to manipulate our conscience depending on how we feel. So the best and most helpful tool to use in making a moral inventory is the Bible, where God tells us, for our own good, what’s right and what’s wrong.
Daniel’s prayer of confession, which you can read in Daniel 9, was born out of his own reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. There’s another famous prayer of confession in the Bible – the prayer of Ezra the priest – that teaches us the same lesson, that a healthy confession begins with reading the Bible. Ezra is one of the people who God picked to help the people of Israel transition back to the land of Israel after their 70 years of captivity and exile. And apparently most of God’s people had no exposure to the Word of God for most of that time. So one day Ezra gathers the people and reads the Book of the Law to them for quite a long time – from daybreak until noon. I know, some of my sermons feel that long, don’t they? And as Ezra read God’s Law to the people, one issue
in particular came to their attention – their marriages. God’s Law was very clear that God’s people shouldn’t marry someone who worshipped other gods. But many of them had done just that, including many of the priests themselves.