Prayer abases intellect and pride, crucifies vainglory, and signs our spiritual bankruptcy, and all these are hard for flesh and blood to bear.
E. M. Bounds1
Possibly, much of the flimsy piety of the present day arises from the ease with which men attain to peace and joy in these evangelistic days. We would not judge modern converts, but we certainly prefer that form of spiritual exercise which leads the soul by the way of Weeping-cross, and makes it see its blackness before assuring it that it is “clean every whit.” Charles Haddon Spurgeon2
Before we can pray, we must be aware of our shortcomings. We must confess our sins, and confession requires humility.
Unfortunately, the church leadership role sometimes works against humility—despite the fact that the ministry is made up of tasks that must be done humbly. For example, the importance of delivering God’s message to spiritually starved people three or four times a week should humble all but the most arrogant of ministers.
Yet effective preaching requires skill. The skill must be developed, and as a preacher’s fluency grows, so will satisfaction with the progress. There’s the problem. Spiritual work becomes secular work the minute it is tainted with pride. If the Christian leader preaches, prays, and counsels with faithfulness and even a little skill, he is praised, and the line between legitimate satisfaction and pride is threatened.
Take the counseling experience of Jim Danhof, pastor of First Covenant Church, Cedar Rapids, Iowa:
“My second year of ministry, I was in a loving, open, warm church. One of the things that goes with ministry in that kind of church is a great deal of counseling. I had some counseling abilities and some early successes. I started to think I was God’s gift to the counseling universe.
“I fully enjoyed the role of messiah. But it took a great deal of time. After a year or so I was working ninety-hour weeks, and I began to realize I didn’t have answers for everyone. I ran up against some walls. That summer I was dealing with three insurmountable counseling problems—the go-home-and-cry-with-your-wife type problems.
“We were coming up on vacation. I was shot. I knew I needed that vacation. My family needed the vacation. Yet here were three crises hanging fire.
“I decided I had to stay and help these families. It was my duty. I told my wife. She got angry and said, ‘We’re going on vacation no matter what.’ I knew she was right, because I had already canceled another vacation during the year. So I said, ‘All we can do is pray about the problems.’ But I’m not sure I thought there was much chance it would help.
“We took our vacation. We prayed every day for those situations. I came back after two weeks expecting the worst—and all three of the problems had been solved. Completely taken care of. Without me.
“I had been struggling to get these people to understand and to work on some things, and nothing had worked. It had gotten to the place where I didn’t know what to tell them. And now I come back from vacation, and none of them needed any more of my counseling.
“At that point I realized what I had been doing. I realized I don’t have the healing power—God does. God could get along very well without Jim Danhof. That was a watershed experience in humility for me.”
From that kind of humility about one’s importance as a counselor, it is a relatively easy step to an overall recognition of one’s standing before God’s righteousness. None of us can measure up. That understanding is the necessary starting point of prayer. It leads to confession, and confession frees love to operate in our lives. If love is the pattern without which the cloth of prayer cannot be woven, confession is the factory whistle that signals when the weaving may begin. Nothing happens until confession takes place.
Most Christian leaders, of course, make sincere attempts at confession. The problem arises not so much in the doing of it, but in the subtle, subconscious ways confession’s true intent can be subverted.
Even biblical characters struggled with honest confession. The biggest temptation for them was to regard confession as a sacrifice to appease God. This was a natural assumption given the sacrificial system Old Testament believers operated under. A fatted lamb on the altar covered all sins. If misunderstood, that could easily become a ritualistic sacrifice to appease God: Confess guilt? Why, when all we have to do is sacrifice another lamb? But, of course, purity of heart was still the telling test. The sacrifice was a public form of confession, but it was worthless without a contrite heart.
The form changed in the New Testament. Christ became the once-for-all sacrifice. Tertullian, a church father whose theological method often was to show how Old Testament practices were remade in the New Testament in light of Christ, argues that prayer in the New Testament takes the place of sacrifice in the Old Testament. In prayer, says Tertullian, we sacrifice our self-will instead of a “holocaust of rams … or the blood of bulls and goats” (Isa. 1:11).3 That confession of our own spiritual bankruptcy opens the door to our petitions for mercy and succor, just as blood sacrifices opened the way to God in the Old Testament.
Today, prayer remains the chief form of our confession. But the threats to confessional prayer have changed somewhat. No longer are we teased with appeasement-related images of the altar. Now we are titillated with the self-realization gospel of the television set and movie theater. Halvor Ness, a retired pastor from Seattle, Washington, notes:
“The biggest problem with our desire to pray is the quest for self-realization, and television is the biggest offender. It preaches self-realization, and a steady diet of that is like pouring ice water inside yourself. You become cold to the claims of the gospel, and you begin looking inward instead of upward. We need to be listening to the gospel, we need preachers who preach with tears.”
An Old Testament Example
One of the most instructive stories of a leader who catches himself in sin and confesses with tears is found in 2 Samuel 24. King David, chief of saints, chief of sinners, found himself leading without humility. He had taken a national census—on the surface, a harmless enough thing. But God saw David act out of kingly pride. Immediately after doing it, David realized his error. He went to the Lord and said, “What I did was very wrong. Please forgive this foolish wickedness of mine.”
The Lord, through the prophet Gad, offered David three choices of punishment: seven years of famine, three days of plague, or three months of fleeing before David’s enemies. David, saying it was better to fall into the hands of the Lord than those of Israel’s enemies, chose the three days of plague. Seventy thousand Israelites died before God lifted the plague.
David’s action and God’s response are particularly instructive because the sin was not one of action, like David’s adultery with Bathsheba or murder of Uriah, but one of attitude. It was a subtle case of pride. Because of its privacy, the lessons we learn about confession are all the more instructive for leaders who often find themselves making decisions in the isolation of leadership. Three lessons stand out:
First, true confession does not necessarily come about because circumstances demand it. Taking a national census was not a crime against humanity. No one was threatened by it. A census could be a good thing under certain circumstances. External pressure did not force David to confess this “sin,” even though his chief military leader, Joab, suggested it was arrogant. David was king and could act contrary to his counselor’s advice if he wished. He confessed because his conscience bothered him—he knew he had acted out of pride.
Second, confession must be a sincere conviction of sin. It is not public apology or ritualistic appeasement. David gained no “political” advantage because of his confession. In fact, the country suffered because he confessed. A census probably seemed a normal thing to do. The public demanded no apology; David had nothing material to gain for his confession.
Third, confession is not the end of the story. Far from it. In the short run, confession made things tougher. We don’t know what would have happened to David had he not confessed his act to God. But it is hard to imagine consequences any worse than what ended up happening. Seventy thousand dead from plague—a high price to pay for sin and reconciling with God.
Why did God punish David’s sin so severely? Perhaps he did not want confession confused with appeasement—confession does not mean we’re off the hook. Confession does not make things easier for us. Confession does not make God look the other way about our sin. Confession does not absolve us of our responsibility. Confession prepares us for conversation with God and acceptance of his forgiveness, his terms, his sovereignty.
The Modern Problem
The danger today is not so much in confusing confession with appeasement (we hardly remember God at all, let alone a need to appease him); our danger is in viewing prayer as a means to mental health. Our results-oriented society evaluates prayer this way:
• unless it produces measurable fruits, it’s ineffective.
• unless it has value to us personally, it’s valueless.
• unless it outperforms TM, counseling, personal growth, and home education, what good is it?
This modern mindset predisposes us to look at prayer as a practical tool for our own benefit. Frankly, however, this “can do” spirit does not mesh well with the humility necessary for prayer.
Only one step further and the Christian leader begins to apply that pragmatic spirit to ministry and make prayer the magic wand that produces good fruit in the local church or religious organization. To be sure, it is almost always done subconsciously. But isn’t that attitude the root of the lament, “I’ve worked so hard at this ministry; why doesn’t God make me feel better about it?”
An even greater danger awaits the successful ministry, which is a greater threat to the prayer of confession than a failing ministry. H. B. London, pastor of the First Church of the Nazarene in Salem, Oregon, says, “It’s hardest for me to pray properly when I am self-righteous. The moment I find myself good enough or adequate, I think I’ve got it made. When things are going well, it’s easy for me to put prayer in the category of just one more successful program.”
Prayer can be cathartic. Prayer can relax us. Prayer can make life more rewarding and fulfilling. A recently released paperback “proved” prayer was a good thing because scientific studies have shown it to do all these things. It can resolve conflict, get rid of guilt, and overcome negative complexes.
But there are days when prayer does not do any of those things. There are days when unresolved sin blocks the positive effects of prayer. It takes time to work through these things with God, and on those days, the positive psychological effects of prayer may be lacking. If we have come to view prayer as nothing more than a psyche-boosting (or church-building) technique, we are bound to be disappointed. Transcendental meditation probably has a better track record when it comes to simply making one “feel good.”
One pastor confessed, “Some days prayer isn’t joyous. When it isn’t, I repent because I believe we’re commanded to rejoice in the Lord always. We ought to feel guilty when we’re not happy in God. But sometimes we aren’t. And if you think of prayer as just a time to feel good, chances are you will run away from God.”
We must recognize the bankrupty of thinking of prayer as the way to feel good, to be guilt-free. That is an impossible, inappropriate goal. In many ways, guilt is the surest proof of God. Guilt is not the weight of an imperfect upbringing, a decadent society, a mind twisted by legalistic parents. Guilt is God calling us back to prayer so he can tell us the reason we were created. Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard said, “A man could not have anything upon his conscience if God did not exist, for the relationship between the individual and God, the God-relationship, is the conscience, and that is why it is so terrible to have even the least thing upon one’s conscience, because one is immediately conscious of the infinite weight of God.”4
The prayer of confession lightens, then finally removes that weight and breaks ground for us to sow our seeds of request and petition.
E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1972), 36.
Arnold Dallimore, Spurgeon (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984), 14.
Tertullian, “On Prayer,” Ante-Nicene Fathers 3 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980), 690.
Quoted in Context, June 1, 1983, p. 4, from Soren Kierkegaard, Parabola.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
