We Feel You
As we left All Church Prayer on Tuesday evening, A firend and I were chatting. He shared a story about praying with someone up front on a Sunday morning. It was beautiful how the Lord orchestrated their encounter. One thing leapt out at me. He told me he knelt to speak eye-to-eye with the nine-year-old who had come forward and told her that he also struggled with what afflicted her.
Prayer is always effective, except when hindered by sin. However, the prayer of identification is especially impactful. When we pray with empathy, consciously grateful for God’s grace to us and genuinely humble in His Presence, we pray from a place of common need. That kind of prayer unites us at the foot of the Cross, where the ground is always level. It is not about the holy ones praying for the sinful ones. It’s about repentant sinners cleansed by God who intercede for other sinner-saints.
That’s what was so beautiful about the story above and so powerful about how another brother led us at the end of the eeninig. He wisely called us to repent before God, as intercessors. That’s key. Yes, it is always good to repent of our sin before prayer, to humble our hearts before God, but what we did last night was similar to Daniel’s prayer:
Daniel 9:4-5
“I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed: Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments, we have sinned…”
Notice that Daniel prays, “I confessed…we have sinned…” — not “I have sinned,” but “…we have sinned…” Daniel identifies with the sin of the afflicted, even though he is one of the few major Bible characters for whom there is no recorded evidence of personal sin. The Scriptures offer nothing indicating that Daniel needed to repent. Yet, he so identifies with the suffering that he begins his intercession with repentance.
Nehemiah prays similarly upon hearing of Jerusalem’s plight. Both men understand the importance of humbly turning to God in our common need. They grasped the truth of what Andrew described last night as “spiritual laws”. King David did as well:
Psalm 139:23-24
Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
Repentance breeds confidence. It reassures us that we take sin as seriously as God does, that we agree upon its ravages and share His disgust at it. However, there is a more important reason that turning from sin fills us with confidence in God’s Presence.
Romans 5:20-21
The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Wow. There is a reciprocity between sin and grace. When we turn from sin and death — whether we do so personally or within prayers of identification — we turn towards a super-abundance of grace and life. It’s not 1:1. It’s more like a 1,000,000:1. Grace abounds all the more. Repentance throws open the doors of heaven so that the fruits of righteousness come pouring out. As one leader wisely pointed out last night, we repent so that God’s grace may abound to us and those for whom we pray.
Did you feel the goodness of it last night? I surely did. I think others did, too. As my friiend turned to leave, he told me that he felt God’s pleasure in our prayers. He said, “God heard us tonight.”
Amen, brother. Let it be so.
— Pastor Steve