When Should We Pray - Before or After We Are Well?

It is not uncommon to feel as if we must get our life right before coming to church.  In our mind, we are too sinful to walk in the doors.  The Lord will not accept us this way.  This mentality not only infects our church life, but also our prayer life - that we must do things for God before we can ask things of Him.  Surely, we think, it'd be selfish to ask God for something, when we had just been so neglectful of Him.

I was overwhelmed today in my devotions from Psalm 51.  This is a common Psalm that many of us run to after falling into sin.  After all, isn't this what David wrote after his sin with Bathsheba?  What I have never noticed, however, is the amount of petitions that he brings to God.  I just counted twenty imperatives that David directed toward God in prayer:

v.1  Have mercy on me...
v.1  blot out my transgressions...
v.2  Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity
v.2  cleanse me from my sin!
v.7  Purge me...
v.7  wash me...
v.8  Let me hear joy and gladness...
v.8  Let the bones that you have broken rejoice.
v.9  Hide your face from my sins...
v.9  blot out all my iniquities
v.10  Create in me a clean heart...
v.10  renew a right spirit within me.
v.11  Cast me not away...
v.11  take not your Holy Spirit from me.
v.12  Restore to me the joy of your salvation...
v.12  uphold me with a willing spirit.
v.14  Deliver me from bloodguiltiness...
v.15  open my lips...
v.18  Do good to Zion...
v.18  build up the walls of Jerusalem...

Take a moment to notice the order of the petitions - mercy, cleansing, revelation, healing, acceptance, renewal, restoration, endurance, evangelism, and glory.

David understood that he could not make himself good enough to come before God.  He understood that it was God alone who could, and, according to His own steadfast love, would do all that was needed to restore His servant to uprightness.  So David began asking.

We must not get this wrong.  The Lord calls sinners to ask Him for all they need.  Just as it makes no sense to go to the doctor after you have become well, it is equally nonsensical to "visit" the Lord after we think we are righteous.

When David was at his lowest, he asked most of the Lord.  His need for righteousness far exceeded his need for a large home or some pimped-out chariot (please excuse the expression). I, too, find that when I am having a good day I may whisper a prayer or two; and when I do, I ask for less than necessary things.

But, when I feel as if my world is falling apart, I take time to actually pray.  And in these prayers I find myself asking for commodities I cannot buy - like mercy, cleansing, revelation, justification, righteousness and so on - commodities that were purchased by the Lord Christ Himself when he died for sinners like you and me.