CLEANSING PRAYER

Cleansing Prayer


Compared with King David, President Clinton is a minor league sinner. I don't mean to minimize his affair and perjury, but it just doesn't stand up to the biblical David's full-blown adultery with Bathsheba, followed by the premeditated "murder" of her husband, Uriah. (David ordered Uriah to the front lines and instructed his commander not to support Uriah's division in battle.)

If David's sin was great, so was his confession in fact, it is one of the most moving and meaningful prayers ever written. From it we can learn a great deal about how to approach God when we are weighed down with guilt a not uncommon experience for any of us. The one thing we want more than anything else is forgiveness, an understanding that we really are cleansed and that we can enjoy a new start. And there have been few prayers written in history that have the power to do that as well as the one recorded in Psalm 51.


Lasting Confession

You can read all the tantalizing details of David's escapades in 2 Samuel 11 and 12. This is a study rich in psychological insight and will pay dividends as an object of devotional study.

Even if we don't commit such "big" sins, though, we each know moments when we realize that we've done something despicable. It may be the betrayal of a confidence, a racist remark, or the neglect of a beggar. Whatever the cause, we feel guilty, lonely, disgusted, and frightened. We want to say something to God, but no words we manufacture can express our tangled emotions.


Psalm 51 has remained a perennial resource for praying about such matters, both for confessing the petty sins of daily life and especially the extraordinary sins that weigh us down (which we'll focus on in this chapter). This Psalm is so rich and holds together so well that we should take it in fully before looking at some of its parts:


"Have mercy on me, O God,
because of your unfailing love.
Because of your compassion,
blot out the stain of my sins.
Wash me clean from my guilt.
Purify me from my sin. For I recognize my shameful deeds
they haunt me day and night.
Against you, and you alone, have I sinned;
I have done what is evil in your sight.
You will be proved right in what you say,
and your judgment against me is just. For I was born a sinner
yes, from the moment my mother conceived me.
But you desire honesty from the heart,
so you can teach me to be wise in my inmost being.
Purify me from my sins, and I will be clean;
wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
Oh, give me back my joy again;
you have broken me
now let me rejoice.
Don't keep looking at my sins.
Remove the stain of my guilt.
Create in me a clean heart, O God.
Renew a right spirit within me.
Do not banish me from your presence,
and don't take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me again the joy of your salvation,
and make me willing to obey you. Then I will teach your ways to sinners,
and they will return to you.
Forgive me for shedding blood, O God who saves;
then I will joyfully sing of your forgiveness.
Unseal my lips, O Lord,
that I may praise you. You would not be pleased with sacrifices,
or I would bring them.
If I brought you a burnt offering,
you would not accept it.
The sacrifice you want is a broken spirit,
A broken and repentant heart, O God,
you will not despise."


Key Assumptions

There is no way even to begin to exhaust the lessons for cleansing prayer from this particular prayer, so I'll limit myself to a few highlights.

To begin, we should note the assumption that David makes entering into prayer: God is a God of "unfailing love" and "great compassion." This is not an easy assumption to make, because after a grave sin, we feel as if God will not listen to us, as if he has, in fact, already rejected us.

That's because that's how we tend to act when someone has seriously betrayed us. I know if my son were to become a pimp and a drug-pusher, let's say, I would be horrified, angry, and confused. I would have a difficult time speaking with him, let alone inviting him into my home. If he took up such a life, he would be rejecting all I had taught him and all that I stood for.

David's prayer, however, will have none of this and starts off with a surprising assumption. God is just, yes. God abhors sin, yes. God has the perfect right to punish sin, yes. But this is not God's essence. Love and mercy are. We approach him with sorrow, yes, but not in fear that is, not the type of fear that wonders what our relationship is with him. We don't have to wonder. We can begin with the assumption that God is there to receive us in all our messiness.


David makes another assumption: He can be purified from his wrongdoing. This is also startling, considering the gravity of his sins. You'd think he could never be "purified" from them.

To be purified, or cleansed, of sin doesn't mean that we don't continue to suffer regret, though. I still shake my head at sins I committed in adolescence! What David rightly assumes is that God has the power and grace to not let our sin stand in the way of a deep relationship with him.

Again, even this is difficult for us to imagine. If my friend betrays me let’s say, lies to a vice president in the company so that he can advance at my expense it’s difficult to imagine how that could not stand in the way of our relationship. Even if I formally forgave him, I would have a tough time trusting him for the rest of my life.

But this is precisely why biblical literature is called a "revelation." This business of mercy and spiritual purity is not something we would think up on our own. It is a truth about God that had to be revealed by God and in this Psalm, it is revealed as clearly as anywhere in the Bible.

A Spade Is a Spade Is a . . .

David's clear view of God's compassion is matched by the crystal clear view of his own sin. In this, he models the three key elements of a confessional prayer.

1. He takes ownership of his actions. "I recognize my shameful deeds." No excuses. No rationalizations. Human beings are natural rationalizers, and we can manufacture excuses in less time than it takes to say, "I'm sorry."

Took too much time for lunch and still left the office early? "Well, I've put in plenty of overtime in my days here and besides, I do more work in six hours than most people do in eight."


Spent a little too much time fantasizing about that woman (or man) at the video store? "Aw, they're harmless thoughts. Besides, I don't do it all that often."

Yelled at your daughter for not cleaning up the living room even though it wasn't her job? "I'd had a tough day and besides, she doesn't do enough work around here."

But David doesn't fall for this human failing (as in, "The pressures of government were overwhelming; my wife and concubines weren't satisfying me; and besides, her husband died in battle what more glorious end would a soldier want?"). David doesn't need to make excuses, of course, because he knows that he's in the presence of "unfailing love" and ''compassion." There's no need to cover his you-know-what.

2. He recognizes who he has wronged, really. "Against you, and you alone, have I sinned." It looks as if David has committed a sin against Bathsheba, Uriah, his own wives, and himself and he has. After all, these are the people most directly hurt by the whole affair. But David also knows the ultimate source of his remorse, the ultimate being to whom he is responsible for his actions.

David knows what we usually learn only from experience: We can apologize to others and try to make it up to them for the rest of our lives, but unless we also deal with God, we'll find no satisfactory cleansing. He's the one who created the moral universe in which we live. He's the one with whom we've ultimately broken faith.

3. He admits that his behavior is part of a pattern. "For I was born a sinner yes, from the moment my mother conceived me." This may strike us as unhealthy self-abasement, but it's really an honest admission of the way things are.

To say, "I'm a sinner and have been so since my birth" is not a statement about who I am at my core. No, I'm a child of God, created in his image. But let's face it, since childhood I have sinned I’ve done and said things that get in the way of my relationship with God and that spoil my relationships with others.

David is simply saying that his adultery and murder are part of a larger pattern. He's not going to blather on about how this was so uncharacteristic of him, that he must have been temporarily insane, or that he ate too many Twinkies, or whatever. No, he admits that he's the type of person who could commit adultery and who could commit adultery again.


This is probably the crux of the whole prayer. The sin we confess needs to be confessed, but it is simply a symptom of a larger problem. Unless we own up to the larger problem, we're not going to be cleansed and we're not going to make any progress in the spiritual life.

That's the great paradox of confession: If we admit we're stuck with our sinful tendencies, we have a much better chance of getting unstuck. But the moment we think we can get ourselves unstuck by trying just a tad harder, we're doomed to getting stuck.


Cleanliness Is Next to Joyfulness

Along the same lines, that's the point of the next section of this prayer: Only God has the power to heal and cleanse our hearts. "Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me" (Psalm 51:10).

The temptation, of course, is to apologize, to vow to do better, and then to reach down to those proverbial boot straps and start tugging. We'll never experience cleansing under these circumstances, though: first, because we can't improve ourselves by our own strength; and second, because we'll fall into self-defeating behavior.

If my wife has "sinned" against me let's say she made fun of me at a party and hurts my feelings. She apologizes and says, "I'll make it up to you." She makes me a special dinner. She gives me a massage. She buys me tickets to a Chicago Bulls game. She compliments me in front of friends at the next party.

But whatever she does has nothing to do with what she has already done. It doesn't "settle the score." It doesn't erase what has been done. It can't take away the experience of embarrassment and shame and she knows it. She'll never feel comfortable in our relationship, no matter what she does, until I forgive her. And for that forgiveness to be healing forgiveness it cannot hinge on her future good behavior. It's a gift, or it's nothing.

In the same way, we must allow God to heal and cleanse us. Instead of a flurry of vows and promises about how we'll never do that again, we are wiser simply to say, "You, Lord, create in me a clean heart. You, Lord, renew a right spirit in me. And help me not get in the way."

Of course, you'll want to change the behavior or situations that brought about the sin in the first place, but not as a way to make it up to God. Do this simply because you don't want to make the same mistake twice. In the meantime, we pray for God to change us from the inside so that we won't even be tempted the next time.

Getting the Word Out

This is probably the most unnerving part of the confessional process, but if experience is any guide, it is an essential step in the process of cleansing. We need to tell our story, from sinful beginning to confessional end, to someone else: "Restore to me again the joy of your salvation, and make me willing to obey you. Then I will teach your ways to sinners" (Psalm 51:12, 13).


By "sinners" David just means "other sinners like me “or, more simply, other people. And by "teaching your ways," he means explaining what God's way has been with him. If this seems a stretch of an interpretation, simply look at the Psalm itself: It is David announcing his story to others.

We needn't be as public as David. Sharing our story with one or two close friends, a pastor, or a spiritual adviser is sufficient. But as many recovery groups, including Alcoholics Anonymous, have discovered, there is no complete healing until we tell our story. Why this is so, it's hard to say. That it is so is the experience of thousands upon thousands of people. God completes his cleansing process in and through other people as we talk, as they listen, as we share intimately with another human being.

Humility, not Piety

At the end of his prayer, David says one more thing that seems troubling but is crucial: "If I brought you a burnt offering, you would not accept it. The sacrifice you want is a broken spirit, a broken and repentant heart, O God, you will not despise" (Psalm 51:16, 17).

When we hear that someone's "spirit has been broken," we think of someone having lost all hope and self-respect. This is not what David has in mind, though. A spirit of haughtiness, pride, stubbornness this is the sort of thing that needs to be broken.

But here's the interesting thing: If you start to get religious about this whole business, you may end up with even more haughtiness and pride than ever. And this is why David puts these two ideas religiosity and humility side by side. Let me explain.

To begin, I'm not against religion as such. As you'll see in Part 6, "Praying with Others," I will encourage you to become part of a worshipping community if you want to really develop your prayer life.

But church is no nirvana. For all its strengths, it has the odd tendency to nurture pride and arrogance. The inner dialogue, which is usually very subtle and which takes months to develop, goes something like this:

"I've sinned indeed. I need to get some help in this. I think I'll start attending worship. . . ." Then a few months go by. "This is really making a difference. I'm much more in control of myself these days. I wish I knew about this sooner. My friends at work could sure use this stuff. . . ." A few more months go by. "If my friends would just get their acts together, like I did, and start coming to church, they wouldn't be in such a mess. I'm a much better person than I've ever been."


You get the idea: a slow and steady accumulation of spiritual pride. In some churches, the pastor will periodically remind people of this temptation, but the temptation is a constant one for the religious.


David wants to clarify at the end of his prayer that, as important as religion is (he himself was an extremely devout Jew), it's not at the heart of cleansing prayer. Humility is.

Just in case you didn't get it, at the heart of humility is a realistic appraisal of who God is (unfailing love), who we are (habitual sinners), and where our help lies (in God).

Needless to say, this prayer deserves repeated visits for meditation and prayer.