Part 3: Why Is Honesty So Hard?
Learning to be honest with God
Even in my most honest prayers I realize that I hardly ever share my entire heart with the Lord. Sometimes, praying to God is hard. And that’s because the enemy loves to put barriers between us and our Father, who implores us to run to Him for everything. This can be so frustrating at times, so much so that we often decide not to pray at all. But if I can encourage you with anything, I want to say that though our prayer lives ebb and flow, Jesus desires to move all of us to deeper honesty with Him. We will never be perfect at prayer, but if we desire a deeper relationship with Him today, Jesus will joyfully teach us how.
Now, if we desire a deep relationship with Him, why is it so hard to be totally transparent with Him? If I were to only pick three reasons, I’d say:
We’re afraid for our sins to be exposed by God
We’re apathetic to prayer
We don’t know what we can pray for
First, we’re afraid for our sins to be exposed by Him. When Adam and Eve sinned against God and ate the forbidden fruit, they hid. God questioned why they hid from Him and Adam said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10). Adam knew they messed up. He knew they disobeyed. Rather than coming to God and telling Him what they did, they hid.
Think about a time in your life when you sinned and hid from God. Did it fix the problem? Did it make the pain go away? We hide from God thinking we can spare ourselves “the lecture,” or the judgment surely to come. But in our hiding, didn’t we still get lectured? Didn’t we still hear the judgment ringing in our ears? But it wasn’t a loving lecture, nor was it a merciful judgment. Because we hid, we felt worse than if we had gone straight to Jesus to confess what happened.
Now, think now about a time when you sinned and ran to God. How fast did you find freedom from your shame? How much forgiveness did you find waiting there? Forgiveness implies coming face-to-face with your sin, but it also implies that Christ showed you thay He forgave you. Once and for all. He showed you that “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12). When we remember that we can be freed from our sins if we bring them to God, we won’t be afraid to be exposed by God. If our loving Father graciously beckons us to lay everything before Him, why wouldn’t we lay down all our sins – naming them one by one – so that we can gain forgiveness for each one?
Secondly, we’re apathetic to prayer. Christians can quickly turn apathetic to prayer during our roughest (or most mundane) seasons. The power of prayer is lost on us. We forget the character of the one we pray to: we forget He’s abounding in steadfast love (Psalm 136). We forget we’re talking to the one “seated on the throne” (Revelation 4:2). We forget the sovereign Lord – the Ancient of Days – is not apathetic towards us. He hears our prayers – He never ignores them. He doesn’t turn His back to us when we talk. He delights to hear our voices. Like a father who loves to hear the voices of his little ones, God loves to hear us share our hearts with Him. Friends, if we could only remember moment by moment that the Creator of the World delights to hear our prayers and delights to answer us, would we not talk to Him every moment we could?
Thirdly, we don’t know what we can pray for. Jesus said in Matthew 7:7-8,
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Jesus tells us that asking is so simple: we can ask and receive, seek and find. But is it really as simple as that?
Sometimes it doesn’t feel like the prayer worked – maybe we prayed the wrong prayer. Sometimes praying for a headache seems too small, so we don’t pray. Sometimes praying for healing from cancer is too much, so we don’t pray. We get stuck before we ever get to the prayer itself! But Jesus assures us that we can ask Him anything. Not that we will be given everything we ask for, but that we can always ask.
A father does not always give his children what they ask for – no one says that’s an unloving thing to do. And yet we tell God it’s unloving to not give us everything we ask.
Just like children, we can learn what to ask our Father for. Listen to Moses’ prayer in Exodus 33:13. “Now therefore, if I have found favor in Your sight, please show me now Your ways, that I may know You in order to find favor in Your sight.”
Moses asks to learn the Father’s heart. He did not want to ask for trivial things – he wanted to ask for whatever aligned with His heart. So when Jesus said, “ask and it will be given to you,” He continued on to say that the Father will give “good things to those who ask Him” (Matthew 7:11). “Good things” is not a subjective term but an objective one that leads us to seek Jesus’ heart. As we consider what to ask God for, we must first consider His heart. He will only do good, and so He will teach us to ask for what is good. Sometimes that means praying for healing from a headache. Sometimes that means praying for healing from cancer. Prayer is never wrong, but God will always change our prayers and convict us to pray new prayers in order to transform our hearts and grow our understanding of His heart.
Prayer is not complicated, nor is it a skill to manipulate God into giving us what we want. This is learning how to be deeply honest with God while learning how to listen to Him. Prayer is a conversation: as we tell Him everything, we must expect that He will also talk back to us. We will always know that He will expose our sins to make us more like Him. We never have to fear His silence, for even in the waiting He is still acting on our behalf. We can trust that in our imploring, He will always teach us what’s on His heart.
We can go deep with God. And He will always teach us how to go deeper. What a sweet gift! How can we not tell Him everything if it means that He will take us deeper every single time?
Friends, there is so much freedom to be found at the foot of the cross, the foot of the throne of Jesus, if we were to just tell Him everything.