Standing Naked Before The Lord

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:10)

When my daughter said her bedtime prayers as a child, she said the same thing every night. In fact, she repeated them so quickly I could hardly keep up. I don’t think she realized what she was saying sometimes, but my family probably wonders the same thing about me when I say table grace. I rarely change a word of it.

Do you realize what you’re saying or do you sometimes just pray out of habit, too? I hope that’s not that case when you seek forgiveness from sin in your life.

It’s okay to offer up the same prayer day in and day out, but what God’s really looking for in all areas of our prayer life is sincerity. And that couldn’t be truer than when we discuss sin with the Lord, which is what the Apostle John meant when he said, “If we confess our sins.” His point is God expects more than lip service from us when it comes to this area of our prayer life. He expects us to mean what we’re saying. Anything else is a waste of time for him and for us.

Let me give you an analogy of what I mean by sincerity. My wife stormed out of the shower one day several years ago, soaking wet, trembling with guilt. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” she said. She had my full attention. There she stood in our bedroom, naked as a jaybird, and dripping wet. She didn’t even stop to turn the shower off. Believe me, I hung on her every word.

The truth is what she told me wasn’t all that bad. But it was something that was important to her for me to know. You could just feel the sincerity.

When it comes to sin, I think God wants us to come to him in much the same way that my wife came to me that night. He wants us to take it all off and stand there before him naked.

Any Christian worth his weight in salt knows how God feels about sin. But what we often fail to realize is that God wants us to feel the same way. In other words, we must first agree with him in prayer that what we’ve done is wrong and is distancing us from him. We need to recognize that sin can destroy our relationship with God, which is just another way of saying, “For the wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23)

But something else happens when we take it all off and confess our sins to the Lord in prayer. Somehow in darkness, we see light in a different way. It’s not so much that that we failed to live up to his standard for us. It’s the realization that we will never measure up. If you ever get here in your prayer life, God will give you the opportunity to abandon a life of legalism, a life where you’ll never experience victory, and choose to live by grace, the only way to live victoriously.

Don’t think for a minute that I’ve arrived. This is a hard station in life to maintain, even for the best of us. There are times when I pray and literally feel his embrace, and then there are times when I revert to my old ways, and simply utter the words, never really giving a second thought to what I’ve said to him. I’m just going through the motions.

I am comforted by the knowledge that God knows the desires of my heart. The other day, for example, I looked up at the sky and said a one-line prayer to him. I can’t remember a time when I was more sincere. And I can’t remember a time lately when I’ve felt his presence more. It was a reminder to me that my prayers don’t have to be long and eloquent. They just have to be sincere. The writer of Hebrews put it this way: “Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.” (Hebrews 10:22)