Continuing our look at Jesus’ instruction on personal prayer, after we establish the appropriate relationship (“Father”), Jesus teaches us that we should surrender to God’s eternal and sovereign authority.
When we pray this, if we pray it with any degree of sincerity, openness or honesty, we are praying, “Lord, I open to You every closet, I am taking every skeleton out for You to examine.” There can’t be any contact with God, any genuine experiencing of the glorious fragrance and wonder of God at work in our lives until we truly pray for God to be revealed in our daily living.
Deep in our being, no matter how we may try to arrange every area of our lives to please God, there are flaws that cause us to miss the mark—even when we try hard. But this prayer is not phrased as simply a confession or an expression of repentance to God. We are not encouraged here to pray, “Help me to be good,” or “Help me to be better.” Instead, Jesus turns our attention entirely away from self to our Heavenly Parent.
The phrase, “Reveal who You are” is really a cry of absolute trust, in which we are saying, “Father, I know that only You can sanctify me. Thus, I will simply stand still and let You be the Holy One who is actually first in my life.”
When we let God be Lord in our lives, we are immediately drawn into a great learning process, and we are transformed by virtue of our exposure to who God is. Martin Luther once said, “You do not command a stone lying in the sun to be warm. It will be warm all by itself.” Similarly, when we say, “Father, there is no area of my life that I will not present to You—my sex life, my business life, my social life, my school life, my family life, etc.,” we are saying, “Reveal who You are!”
When we pray this way we discover that God will walk into the dark closets of our lives, where the odor is sometimes too much even for us to stand, and clean them out and straighten them up and make them fit for God’s dwelling: “If we walk in the light (not sinless perfection, but complete openness before God, where we invite Him into everything), God being the light, we also experience a shared life with one another, as the sacrificed blood of Jesus, God’s Son, purges all our sin (I John 1:7).”
(We invite your comments. Feel free to share this devotion with your friends and invite them to subscribe by forwarding their email address to the Pastor at: fredjeffsmith@gmail.com.)
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