The Prayers God Doesn't Want

If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, 

even his prayer is an abomination. 

Proverbs 28:9

Wait! What? You mean there are some prayers God doesn’t want? 

According to scripture, yes. Prayer is a universally accepted idea, but we want to set our own rules for it. The majority of adults claim that they pray, but is God listening to those prayers? Scripture commands us to pray, but there are some guidelines for those prayers. For example, will God honor the prayer of a man who flings himself off a skyscraper with the words: “God, keep me safe?” Or would God honor the prayer of a murderer asking for nice weather for his next kill? Obviously, God does not welcome every prayer, but we want to think that He always hears ours. But does He? How do we know? Fortunately, He’s spelled it out pretty clearly for us.

God is all about the heart, because the heart determines our actions. We may say, “I don’t believe in stealing,” but we slip a twenty out of our employer’s cash register. We lied. We do believe in stealing. We may say, “I don’t believe in having sex outside marriage,” but our significant other is moving in next week. We lied. We do believe we can do whatever we want. Actions are our hearts on display. We may say we love God, but our actions indicate whether or not we are lying (1 Jn. 2:4). So, when we continually defy God’s clear commands, He doesn’t want to hear our requests. They disgust Him. He’s not fooled by our lying lips; he sees our hearts. When we’ve become our own gods, He knows it and He does not listen to idol worshipers.

Are you turning your ear away from hearing God’s law? The only prayer He wants to hear is repentance. 

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Reboot Your Life

Create in me a clean heart, O God; 

and renew a right spirit within me.  

Psalm 51:10

“This stupid computer keeps freezing up!” Andy shouted and kicked away from his desk, throwing his hands into the air. “I hate computers! Now I have to call the geek squad again.” 

Dan set his coffee cup carefully on the edge of the desk and peered at his co-worker’s screen. “Restart it,” he suggested. 

Andy frowned. “Nah, that won’t work. I probably need to throw this away and buy a new one.” 

Dan shrugged. “It’s your money, but I’d restart it. Sometimes it just needs a fresh start and it will work like new.” 

Andy frowned at his co-worker, but did as he suggested. In moments, his computer was working perfectly. 

Dan tried not to look smug as he picked up his cup. “Yep. Thought so. Just needed a fresh start. Wish I could reboot like that.”

Psalm 51:10 tells us that we can. Our lives get a reboot when we confess our sin and turn away from it. Like computers, our lives collect garbage that weighs us down and freezes our relationship with God. Sometimes the past seems overwhelming and we feel stuck in a sea of bad decisions. We have no way to free ourselves, so we give up, assuming we are worthless. But God doesn’t give up on us. Like Dan, He suggests, “Restart it.” We restart our lives when we bring our mess to Him and agree to obey Him. He erases the stains on our hearts and replaces despair with hope. He renews our thinking and helps us move on.

Does your life need a reboot? Confess your sin to God and agree to do things His way. He gives fresh starts.

Prayer: Father, I feel like that computer. I feel frozen by my past and current sins. But your word says you can free me and make me new. I surrender it all to you now. Take this sin from me, cleanse my heart, and renew me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

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Roadblocks

 

The road is dark and winding, but you are sure you're headed in the right direction. You can't wait to get there. You've heard about it from others and you want to get there with all your heart. 
You press the accelerator and WHAM! You hit something. The car stops dead in the road.

Rather than find out what you hit, you turn your head and stare out the side window into the dark. You press the accelerator harder. Nothing. You put the car in reverse, back up a few inches, then plow forward again. WHam! Same thing. Something is in the way and you don't know what it is. You're not going anywhere.

What would you do?

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 SIN.

It's a tiny word with a big ugly feel to it. We hardly hear it anymore. It has become unfashionable. Even from the pulpit, we rarely hear it mentioned. We have decided it is harsh and sounds judgmental. It might offend people and above all, we must not offend.

Satan loves this line of thought. He invented it. Because he knows something that even most professing Christians don't know: Repentance is the doorway to freedom.

Unconfessed sin is a roadblock on our path to spiritual wholeness. We slam into it as we try to draw closer to God, but we refuse to look at it. We come up with every excuse Satan can provide to avoid confessing it to God. 

"It was a long time ago."
"It wasn't that big a deal."
"Lots of people do that."
"I'm not perfect. Everyone makes mistakes."

We turn our heads and refuse to see what is in the way of our moving toward God. We get frustrated with our progress and add guilt to the equation. So we press the accelerator on Bible reading, prayer time, or church attendance to see if that will overcome the obvious stall in our path to God. Nothing happens.

One of Satan's favorite tricks for Christians is to convince us that we don't need to continue to repent. We are saved from our sin, so everything is fine from here on. Right?

Wrong. We may be saved from the eternal penalty of our sin, but we must maintain the continuing freedom from it here on earth. When we mess up (and we will), confession to God and repentance restores us once more to that fellowship we long for. Unconfessed sins are like bricks in a wall between us and God. HE didn't build the wall; we did. And only we can tear it down through confession and rejection of it.

Have you hit something in the road toward God? Don't turn your head and pretend you don't know what it is. Confess it. God already knows about it and is waiting to cleanse you of it so you can move forward together.

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Got a Bungee Cord?

Imagine climbing up the face of a rocky mountain, the summit scarcely visible through the clouds. Your task is made more difficult by a thick bungee cord tied around your waist and anchored at the base camp.

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The harder you press upward, the tighter the cord grows, the pressure mounting with every step. One slip and you'll go zinging right back down where you started.

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When we try to approach God on our terms, it can feel like climbing a mountain with a bungee cord pulling us backward.

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That bungee cord is unconfessed sin.

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Satan has a host of tired but effective suggestions to dissuade us from bringing our sin before the Lord. He knows quite well God offers forgiveness, but he also knows how many Christians don't realize it.

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It was so long ago, God has forgotten it...

It was such a little thing...

It wasn't as bad as what some people do...

Everyone else was doing it too... If I can move on, God can too...

I'll just start fresh from here.

No sense digging into the past...

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There are other variations on the theme, but the results are the same. The thick curtain that separates you from the presence of God stays in place and no amount of dutiful activity quite removes it. Human effort kicks into high gear and we do everything we can think of to impress God, except the very thing He requires: repentance.

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If you're struggling with the feeling that there exists a vast canyon between you and God, you may be right. When you set aside all the excuses you've been relying on for so long, God will clearly show you the shovel you've been using to dig that canyon. All it takes is a humble, willing heart and God does the rest.

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God is not bound by time. A sin in your past is a sin in the present to God, if it has never been taken to the Cross and paid for.

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So what's lurking in your past? That unconfessed sin of the past may be the very thing that is keeping the warmth and favor of God out of your present.

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The amazing part is that once sin is gone and your heart is clean before God, the very bungee cord that held you back, reverses direction. It is now attached to the top of the mountain and your trip to God is effortless.

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OUCH! That hurts!

Ever walk with a lump in your shoe?

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It's terrible if you can't stop to get rid of it. Maybe you're on a timed hike, trying to keep up with a group, running late...

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You try to ignore it at first, hoping it might resolve itself. Many steps later, you feel the blister forming, but you keep ignoring it. Now, you're hobbling along, every step painful, but you're determined something as small as a rock or a misplaced shoe part isn't going to make you lose whatever it is you're chasing.

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If you continue wearing those shoes with the lump, eventually you'll create a callus where the blister was. Now it hardly hurts at all and you consider the problem solved. It's not solved, of course. That callus causes problems of its own and sometimes you don't ever connect the new problems with the lump that started the whole thing.

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Unconfessed sin is like that. How many times do we commit a dreadful offense against the Lord or someone else, but pride won't let us admit it? We cover it up, shy away from dealing with it, and sweep it under our mental rug, hoping the Lord will forget about it.

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Years go by. We pretend everything is fine with us spiritually, but deep down we know something rubs wrong. There's a pain we can't identify. Life isn't working like it should. We pray and nothing happens. We force ourselves through religious-looking exercises, trying to alleviate the pain, but it does no good. There's a dead spot inside that should feel better, but it only adds to the emptiness.

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If that sounds painfully familiar, I have a question for you: Looking back on your past, is there a sin in your life that you never took to the cross? It was too horrible, too gross and you turned your head away and hoped that was good enough. Or you renamed it, excused it, and wore yourself out justifying it until you felt that callus form over your spirit. It didn't work, did it.

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God offers a salve for those blistering sins. He's already paid the doctor bill to have it worked on. Relief and victory are so close, but you chose your own way to find them. After all, confessing it to God would require you to admit it was wrong and there's something inside each of us that insists on justifying what God plainly calls sin.

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We have to humble ourselves. Admit we messed up. Admit we can't fix it and ask God to do it for us. Humbling self is hard to do. That callus of pride is so tough by now it takes a pretty sharp knife to slice it off, but God has just the one for it. His Word. When we dare compare our action with God's expectation, we quiver in shame. Yep, it was sin all right.

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As a counselor, I am struck by how many problems started from that unconfessed sin way back in the past. Shame. Hardness of heart. Anger. Depression. When I ask, "Is there a sin in your past you never confessed to God?" I am always surprised that the client knows right away which sin it is.

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Such relief and peace come when they get that taken care of. The rock is no longer in the shoe. It's over. The blister can heal and the callus can come off.

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Do you have a callus on your heart? Is there a stubborn area you've been hiding from God, hoping He'd forget? He hasn't. And neither have you. Take it to him. Lay it on the altar and confess how wrong it was. He's not there to beat you up. He's there with the First Aid kit.

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Haven't you limped long enough?

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