What We Might Need To Confess

This, then, is how you should pray:

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come and your will be done,
    on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today
our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
    as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
    but deliver us from the evil one. - Matthew 6:9-13

On Sunday as the five different speakers were talking about the five different sides of the House of Prayer (below), when it got to the Peacemaking side something interesting came up. Cody Miller talked about our need to make peace with one another and with God. In the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our sins” is covers reconnection with God, and “as we forgive others” covers our reconnection with others. But then he took it a little different direction.

As he led us in a short time of prayer, he invited us to consider if one of the blocks we have between us and God is that we blame God for the sins of the church. Because so many of us have been hurt so badly and so often by so many different Christians, we’ve tended to hold that against God - and maybe it’s time to talk directly to God about that and to let God go, so to speak. Maybe it’s time to recognize that God isn’t to blame for all the things the church has done wrong.

So if that’s you today, take some time to work that through with God. If not, just pray through the Lord’s prayer, pausing on each side of it and allowing different thoughts or faces or issues to surface and pray through those.