When I started
using a prayer journal published by Barbour Publishing, I didn’t notice right
away that it was missing something rather important. It had sections for "new prayer requests," "ongoing prayer requests," answers to prayer" and "praises" but no room for "confessions."
When I was
growing up, my dad would frequently include the request that God “keep sin far
from us.” But was I really taught that
I needed to confess specific sins to God each day? Not really. In distancing
ourselves from the Roman Catholic practice of confessing to a priest, maybe we
Protestants started skipping any kind of confession.
Well, that was not
true of a relatively unknown believer named Samuel Ward, who was born in 1577
and lived in Britain. This man had a tender conscience and recorded his
shortcomings in a diary. While his name
may be unfamiliar, he was the youngest member of the team of translators that
prepared the King James Version.[1]
After reading
about Samuel Ward and hearing a sermon at a church I was attending only as a
visitor, I began a notebook alongside my “prayer journal” for recording my own
confessions. By writing them down, I
was forced to think back to ways I had offended God or the people around
me. I searched out what I had done
wrong and ways I failed to do good, and brought them before the One who could
forgive me. Whether we record them or
not, making confession to our Lord Jesus is an important part of our
relationship with him. When we become
so familiar with him that we gloss over our faults in our push to have our
requests granted, we will find a coldness settling into our spiritual lives.
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