Search Me, O God

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. PSALM 139:23–24

After adoration, Moody’s next three elements of prayer belong together. Confession, restitution and thanksgiving all concern the heart that comes before God: its honesty about sin, its willingness to put things right, and its gratitude for what has already been given. None of them is exotic. All of them, Moody believed, are commonly neglected, and their neglect explains a great deal of powerless prayer.

Confession begins at home

Moody opens his chapter on confession with a sentence aimed not at the unconverted but at the church. “I think we, as Christians, have a good many sins to confess.” The men who lived nearest to God, he observes, were those who confessed most deeply. Daniel, against whom nothing is recorded, made one of the humblest confessions in the Bible. Isaiah, seeing the Lord, cried that he was undone. Job, whom God Himself called perfect, abhorred himself in dust and ashes.

I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. PSALM 32:5

Moody was convinced that revival had to begin here. “I firmly believe that the Church of God will have to confess her own sins, before there can be any great work of grace.” He sometimes thought, he said, that it was time to stop preaching to the ungodly and preach to those who professed to be Christians. A higher standard of life in the church would bring thousands into the kingdom. And he said something even sharper: that the lukewarmness and formality of the church were making more unbelievers than all the books unbelievers ever wrote.

The verse people stop reading

In the same chapter Moody points to a verse that, he says, is quoted in the wrong place ninety-nine times out of a hundred. People quote the first half of Isaiah 59:1 and stop.

Behold, the LORD’S hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear. ISAIAH 59:1–2

Of course God’s hand is not shortened. The question is what we have put between ourselves and Him. Moody had a list of messages from parents, as many as fifty in one week, asking him to pray for their unconverted children. He did not doubt their love. But he wondered aloud whether, as a rule, the fault did not lie at their own door: some secret sin that was keeping back the blessing.

If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. PSALM 66:18

“Unconfessed sin is unforgiven sin,” he says, and he asks his readers to learn by heart David’s prayer that heads this chapter, and to pray it every day. Notice the pronoun: search me, not my neighbour. “It is so easy to pray for other people, but so hard to get home to ourselves.” And there is a difference, Moody adds, between God searching me and my searching myself. I may examine my heart and pronounce it sound; when God searches it as with a lighted candle, things come to light I never knew were there. Among them he names jealousy for our own reputation, and the sectarian spirit that cannot rejoice when another church is blessed.

Restitution in prayer

The third element is restitution, which we met in the chapter on repentance. Moody returns to it in Prevailing Prayer because he found that it was the one subject he could never raise without immediate results. When he spoke of it, people left meetings and took trains to distant cities to repay old employers.

He tells of a woman in the north of England who could not find peace. At last she told a worker that whenever she knelt to pray, a few bottles of wine kept coming before her mind. Years before, as a housekeeper, she had taken them from her employer. He was dead; she did not know what they had been worth. But she found his son, took him more than enough to cover them, and came back, Moody says, one of the happiest people he had ever met.

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. MATTHEW 5:23–24

Moody was blunt about religion that stopped short of this. “I am getting so tired and sick of your mere sentimentalism, that does not straighten out a man’s life.” Hymns and prayers are an abomination to God, he says, unless we are willing to be straightforward in our daily dealings. Nothing would give Christianity such a hold on the world as believers acting like Zacchaeus.

Thanksgiving

The fourth element is gentler, and it is the one Moody thought most neglected. Ingratitude, he says, is about the hardest thing we have to meet with. Every parent knows how little pleasure there is in doing things for a child who never says thank you.

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. PHILIPPIANS 4:6

“There is a great deal more said in the Bible about praise than prayer; yet how few praise-meetings there are!” He points to the dedication of Solomon’s temple: Solomon prayed well, but it was when the singers and trumpeters were as one, praising the Lord, that the glory filled the house. And he notes that Paul, who suffered more than any apostle, gave thanks more than any, writing his most joyful letter to the city where he had been beaten and imprisoned.

It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the LORD … that then the house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the LORD. 2 CHRONICLES 5:13

Even if nothing else called for thanks, Moody says, it would always be enough that Christ loved us and gave Himself for us. He tells of a farmer found kneeling at a soldier’s grave near Nashville. The soldier had taken his place in the draft, when the farmer’s family were all sick, and had died of his wounds. The farmer had travelled many miles to write over the grave: He died for me.

A caution

Moody’s teaching here is bracing, and most of us need it. But his readers should hold it with care. The link he draws between parents’ secret sins and their children’s unbelief is a real warning, not a rule; children make their own choices, and many godly parents have wept over prodigals without any hidden sin to blame. Self-examination is healthy when it ends at the cross. It becomes morbid when it never ends at all. Moody’s own counsel elsewhere applies: take a good look at the wound, and then fix your eyes on Christ.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Pray Psalm 139:23–24 slowly every morning this week, and write down anything God brings to mind.

2. Is there something that comes before your mind whenever you kneel to pray, as the bottles of wine did for that housekeeper? Deal with it.

3. Is there a church or Christian group you find it hard to see blessed? Pray for their blessing by name.

4. Keep a list of answered prayers and daily mercies for a month, and give thanks for them aloud.

5. Read the chapters Confession, Restitution and Thanksgiving in Prevailing Prayer, in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Search me, O God, and know my heart. Not my neighbour’s heart, Lord; mine.

Bring to light whatever stands between us, and give me grace to confess it plainly and put right what I can.

Forgive me for my ingratitude. You have loaded me with benefits, and I have complained.

Above all, thank You that Christ died for me. Let my prayers be full of praise, and let Your glory fill the house. Amen.