Finding God When You've Failed
Honesty is indeed a prerequisite to effective prayer. But it can also be cleverly guided on a boomerang path by our arch opponent. "How can I pray when I know I've failed God?" I may ask myself. The awareness of recent sin or even a remote memory can haunt the mind and cripple all confidence in prayer. Further, I will never feel guilt but that Satan, whom God's Word labels as the accuser as well as the adversary, will hound my mind with added evidence of my unworthiness and, therefore, of my hopelessness if I do pray. "You've botched it up so badly, how can you seriously expect a hearing from God? You don't deserve anything. You know it, and He knows it! Forget it!" Some of us will even press beyond that lying attack to the point of praying something, somehow, but the words - when the mind is bombarded by guilt and condemnation - have a way of falling to the floor. Absent is that sense of the creative power when we speak boldly in simple tru...