2. Prayers of Repentance

Introduction

Good Morning and welcome to week 2 of our “lazy days of summer” series. Ok that is really not the title of the series and certainly I am not encouraging laziness…but in our culture that is so wired to value productivity and accomplishment over everything else... slowing down for any reason may feel like we are being lazy.

But there is value in intentionally…slowing…down.... for a season. Especially if it is to be mindful of heart issues that can easily be ignored in a flurry of activity. One of those issues that can get pushed out is how we PRAY.

Last week we said that most of us believe that we don’t pray like we should and we can be resistant to even talking about it because we feel guilty about past commitments we made to PRAY with a certain frequency or fervor and it didn’t last very long. So it can be discouraging to consider any changes we need to make in our prayer life again.

But what we are after here in this series is to PRAY with a new motivation. Instead of being motivated by a guilty feelings of not meeting some expectation that we have set for ourselves, we want to consider what God is looking to do in our lives when we PRAY. Instead of being driven by the negative feelings of guilt, we can be drawn into prayer, even a desire to linger in God’s presence as we PRAY because we know that it is doing a deeper kind of work that anything that can be checked off a “to-do list”.

In addition to taking this new posture, we also introduced a practical tool to help us keep some balance when we PRAY. It is acrostic using the letters in the word PRAY to remind us of how Jesus taught us to PRAY.

P is for Praise,

R is for Repent

A is for Ask

Y is for Yield

And I promised last week that we would look at how these four prayer prompts can be found in how Jesus taught us to pray. So from Matthew chapter 6 we read Jesus saying....

Matthew 6:9–13 (ESV)

9 Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. 10 Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread, 12 and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

This is often referred to as “The Lord’s Prayer”, or at least the lion’s share of it, and many more liturgical churches recite it on a weekly basis. Although we don’t find them in in order, I think you can see our four prompts in Jesus’ example of how to pray

9“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. is an example of PRAISE

10 Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven is an example of what it looks like to YIELD to God and his will.

11 Give us this day our daily bread, is ASKING God

12 and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors is to REPENT

13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil is probably another ASK

And last week we introduced the first of these in Praise and we took some time in the service to praise God for both His Attributes: who HE is and His Actions: what HE has done in your life. My hope is that you were drawn back to those ideas later in the week as well.

This morning we are going to look at the second prayer prompt which is to Repent. This corresponds with Jesus’ instructions to pray...

and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors

Tension

In the many times that you may have recited the Lord’s Prayer, have you ever stopped to consider the relationship between the two haves of this part of the prayer? That Jesus’ teaching on praying for forgiveness actually rides on top of the statement that we are to be people who forgive others.

There is a significant relationship between these two realities that we cannot afford to overlook. Especially because Matthew tells us that after this teaching on prayer Jesus says...

Matthew 6:14–15 (ESV)

14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 15 but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

I don’t know about you, but that verse is a bit alarming to me. I know at least a measure of my need for forgiveness so if my un-forgiveness of others can somehow get in the way of God forgiving me when I pray...then that is something that I want to know about so I can address it.

And I confess I don’t know that I completely understand how all these things work, but I am invested in finding out because I am beginning a 6 week Sabbatical at the end of the month and I expect to spend time learning to Pray. So if there is something that I miss here that has helped you learn to PRAY better I am open to suggestions, but to start in on REPENT we are going to explore 1 John chapter 1. It’s on page 1021 in the Bibles in the chairs if you want to turn there. I will pray and we will seek to learn from the Word of God together.

Truth

I think that I thought first of 1 John 1 because it contains one of the first Bible verses that many people memorize. This is great because it is a very powerful verse, but I am not sure we always apply it like we should. The verse is 1 John 1:9 and if you know it say it with me...

1 John 1:9 (ESV)

9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

This is an incredible statement on the importance of our confession of sin and the beauty of God’s faithfulness to forgive us and cleanse us…but too often this verse is aimed solely at the unbeliever, but I don’t think that was John’s intention. I believe that this verse is instructing Christians to confess and repent of their sins in an ongoing and continual way. Especially as they PRAY.

To make my case, let’s back up to verse 5 of 1 John 1 where we read...

1 John 1:5–6 (ESV)

5 This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 6 If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

To answer our questions of who this verse is primarily for, we need to know who is this “we” that John is talking about.

Who is the “we”?

The book of 1 John was written to the Church in the late first century so some time around 90 AD. So it has been about 60 years since Jesus established His Church and in that time, a lot of wrong teachings popped up about what being a follower of Jesus consisted of. John’s primary reason for writing this letter was to contradict and correct those false teachings that had risen up in the Church.

The most popular of these false teachings was a religious philosophy called Gnosticism. We have talked about this before, but this is a religious philosophy named after the Greek word for knowledge, “gnosis” and it taught a separation between the physical and spiritual self. This meant that one could live their physical life any way they wanted and still have their spiritual life on track.

There are many today who have bought into this same idea without the label. They are trusting in some so called spiritual experience they had in the past that promised them access to heaven even though they have lived like hell ever since.

1 John is a great place to go to untangle this terrible idea. With that in mind, lets look at these verses again. John says...

5 This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, (original message of an apostle) that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 6 If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

And if we stopped reading here we might think that John is talking just about unbelievers who just think they are believers…but he continues in verse 7 with more “we” statements. He says...

7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

Since the Apostle John continues to say “we”, it is a hard sell for me to think that he is comparing non-Christians to Christians. They couldn’t both be “we”, since any reference John made to “we” would have included the Apostle himself.

So my conclusion is that this message must be for Christians…which is a very striking when considering the “we” statement in the next verse which says...

8 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

If this “we” is us, and I believe it is, then we will have to do something with this verse. Certainly we are known by other names, higher names like the beloved, the saints, the elect, the bride, the Church and so on…but that doesn’t erase what we see here about being people who still “sin”.

And if we are honest…we know this to be true. We prove it true on a regular basis.

The Christian Church is and will always be full of people who still sin and to say anything else is…according to 1 John…a lie.

Sin is Never Safe

Maybe you thought that placing your faith and trust in Jesus meant that you didn’t have to worry about sin any more, but that is not entirely the case.

I have said this before many times, but Sin is never safe and so Jesus died to save us from the penalty, the power and the presence of sin.

The penalty for sin is death, but Jesus died in our place

The presence of sin is everywhere on earth, but Jesus is preparing a place for us in heaven where there is no sin.

The power of sin had a hold of everyone of us, but when we put our faith in Jesus, we have the power to say no to sin…but we don’t always use it.

Even after all that Jesus has done for us…we still sin. We still trespass his laws. We still incur debts here. So what are we to do with the fact that even after we have been forgiven for our sin…we still sin?

I think this is what 1 John 1:9 addresses and what our prayer point is all about.

9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Since God is light and there is no darkness in Him at all we cannot “linger in his presence” like we talked about last week if we are continuing to walk in the darkness of our sin. We cannot experience fellowship with God while still choosing to walk in the darkness of sin. So God made a way for his children to continue to become clean by the blood of Jesus through confession and repentance of our sin.

1 John 1:9

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

If you don’t have it memorized already, you will by the end of today. And then he doubles down again on our record of sin...

1 John 1:10 (ESV)

10 If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

Guys this is such an important piece of experiencing a different motivation when it comes to how we PRAY. We will never be drawn to PRAY when we show up and there is a wall there between us and God. We have to handle that first.

This is why Jesus concluded his teaching on prayer with such strong words on how forgiveness works. If we are so drifted and distant from the fellowship of God that we can harbor un-forgiveness in our hearts...then we need to deal with that before we ask God to forgive us. We can’t ask Jesus to cover our sin while at the the same moment be sinning against others. He won’t be played like that.

Don’t misunderstand me, this is not about someone’s eternal destiny. You don’t jump in and out of the family of God based on your behavior...but with the life you have left to live on this earth you can draw closer in fellowship with God or you can drift further away from Him.

Listen to the Pastor heart of the Apostle John as he continues in chapter 2 of 1 John. He says…

1 John 2:1-3 (ESV)

1 My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.

Do you hear the tender affection that John has for the Church. He knows how destructive sin is and His heart for them is that they would steadily grow in the righteousness of Christ, but...verse 1 continues to say...

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 2 He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. 3 And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments.

A corny but effective way to remember what John is saying here is to remember that

“Christians are not sinless, but over time they do sin less”

This is because the more time you spend in fellowship with God the more in tune you are to his will and ways. (say again?)

Gospel Application

This is something that Jesus modeled for us, maybe the only thing that we can learn from Jesus’ life on the topic of Repentance. Because Jesus never needed repentance like we do. He never sinned. But for all his life He was drawn to spend time in fellowship with God the Father.

As the God-man, He knew that He could not accomplish the mission that He was given without maintaining a deep fellowship with the Father. He declared His dependence on the Father over and over again...

John 5:19 (ESV) 19 ... the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing...

John 5:30 (ESV) 30 “I can do nothing on my own...because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me.

John 8:28 (ESV)28 ... I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me.

John 12:49 (ESV)

49 For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak.

As God in the Flesh, Jesus was dependent on this constant unbroken fellowship with the Father. He nurtured it. He made time for it. He was drawn to it. Every Gospel writer records how the disciples had to keep looking for Him because he would constantly go off to be alone with the Father to PRAY.

This is because the more time you spend in fellowship with God the more in tune you are to his will and ways

But a time did come when that fellowship was broken. And the same thing that destroyed His fellowship destroys ours. The very same thing. It was our sin.

It wasn’t Jesus’ sin, he was truly sinless, but when He went to the cross he took on himself the sin of the world and as the song says, “The Father turned his face away...”

That is how the song writer described this broken fellowship from the perspective of what was happening in heaven, but Scripture tells us what was happening here on earth.

Matthew 27:45–46 (ESV)

45 Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. 46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Before this point Jesus never spend a moment outside of the fellowship with the Father, it had just always been there and He was constantly depending on it, feeding on it, walking in it. But as he bore the weight of all our sin everything went dark and He was in agony over the brokenness of their fellowship.

In his book A Praying Life, Paul Miller comments that “Jesus’ agony is our normal.”

Landing

As fallen creatures we are born with a sin nature that keeps us from the kind of fellowship with God that He intended us to have when He created us. Then we each affirmed our sin nature with our own contributions of Sin to our world. Our only hope was that God would act. That God would do something.

And He did. He sent His Son Jesus to save us from the penalty, power and presence of Sin. Still, we don’t always choose Him. And even though our eternity is secure, we can live a life that is far from God’s presence because we love our sin more than Him.

But again He has made a way for us to daily be cleansed from the sin that damages and destroys us.

1 John 1:9 (ESV)

9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

If you have never put your faith and trust in Jesus then this is as good a place to start as any. Recognize the futility of trying to get right with a holy God on your own and trust in His way, the way of Jesus.

If you are a Christian, then this message is for you too. It’s the next verse that says...

1 John 1:10 (ESV) 10 If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

To maintain our fellowship with God though Jesus we need to confess our sins, turn from them and walk in the light of love of Jesus again. We will never be sinless, but hopefully as we draw closer in fellowship with God we will sin less.

As we did last week, I am going to lead us in a time of prayer. We often do go after this one in preparation for communion, which happened to be scheduled for next week, but I think it would be good to look at it again today.

I again included a Psalm, Psalm 51 on the back of the notes page if it will help to look at how King David repented after his great sin with Bathsheba and her family.

So we will leave a couple of minutes, some of you may need longer than others depending on how your week went…but feel free to spend the time you need. I will close in prayer in a couple of minutes and then we will move right in to worship but feel free to keep praying...