Will God hear your prayer or your worship if you don’t start out by telling Him how unworthy you are to come before Him? (By the way, the question assumes that you are a Believer.) Will God the Father hear your prayers if you don’t start out by unloading all your sins at once?
There is a time and place when you may be so overburdened by sin that you just have to blurt it out. And that’s okay. On a regular basis, however,
it is important for us to prepare our hearts and set the tone by acknowledging His blessed and bountiful mercy first. And, certainly, the Holy Spirit likely intercedes on our behalf when we burst through the door.
Even in David’s psalm of confession and repentance (Psalm 51) he starts with a praise to God, that He is merciful and has steadfast love. Those statements were interspersed with David’s acknowledgement of sin. But David did acknowledge his merciful Father in heaven!
I remember hearing a long time ago that Psalm 24 is model for prayer: “Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord and stand in His holy place”… he who has clean hands and a pure heart. Even then, though, Psalm 24 starts out with praise. Yes, we need to repent of our sin (teshuvah).
A hindrance to frequent prayer?
It can be difficult to make time for prayer if the first thing we have to do is confess all of our sins right out of the gate. If you are spiritually aware, you know that you sin all the time. You will never have absolutely clean hands and an absolutely pure heart. Why bother to pray at all if our Abba Father won’t hear us if we miss a few sins? That sort of thinking will turn you in spiritual Eeyore!
Part of coming to the Father with a clear heart is acknowledging that He is the one true God and all that that encompasses. How else can you begin to ask from forgiveness if you don’t acknowledge who He is? Once we do praise Him, our whole mindset is changed and I think that it helps move us from being remorseful over sin to really wanting to turn away from it.
Praise God from the time you wake up
We are supposed to praise God as we wake up in the morning, thanking Him for allowing us to live another day. We bless Him and thank Him for being creator and King of the universe, our rock, savior and shield. If you follow a prayer book (siddur), there are 15 blessings said to start the day (he opens the eyes of the blind, releases the bound, clothes the naked, etc.). And then we acknowledge and ask that His will be done.
But where’s the acknowledgement of sin? Well, specific sins will surface as we praise Him and do need to be confessed. Going through the exercise of praising Him ought to naturally awaken your soul to be humbled before Him. As we outwardly praise Him it should force us to look inward and see our sin.
Consider this: is prayer focused on God or on us?
Our Messiah Yeshua gave us a model prayer which may have left the disciples thinking, “But rabbi, we do that already!” Indeed, the Lord’s Prayer or Disciples’ Prayer is essentially a condensed Jewish prayer. God is acknowledged and praised, we ask that His will be done and that Yeshua comes back and the kingdom be established, and that He take care of our daily needs.
It isn’t until halfway through the Lord’s Prayer that our sin is confessed — with the caveat that we also forgive those who have transgressed against us (ouch, that hurts!). Again, that is also modeled in Jewish prayer.
And Your Point Is?
Launching into prayer and even setting aside a time of prayer can be very difficult. I wonder if part of the difficulty is that some of us were taught early in our experience as Believers that if you don’t start out by confessing every sin, God won’t hear you. Or, we learned that we are unworthy to come before God if we do not do so.
First of all, we are not unworthy to come before our Father if we have accepted Yeshua as our Savior. Second, the prayer model Yeshua gave His disciples oozes with praise and finally gets around to asking for forgiveness (and giving forgiveness) six lines into the prayer into its ten lines.
Daily prayer is worthwhile and necessary. The biblical model of prayer is morning, noon and night (Paul told us to pray without ceasing).
If you struggle with setting aside time for prayer, perhaps spending that time praising God will make it easier to make prayer a priority.
After all, prayer is all about Him, not about us — as it draws us closer to Him.
L’Shalom
-Chris Orr