Why I Pray in Christ's Name

“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 59:2).

A while back I was turning into the driveway of my house when the driver behind me started honking his horn.  This is not the first time someone has honked at me.  I live on a fairly busy two-lane state highway that many apparently believe is the German Autobahn (I've long lost count of the number of times I've seen the highway patrol with someone pulled over right in front of my house).  But why people blare their horns when I'm signaling a ninety-degree right turn is a little confusing.  I guess they think I should make that turn at full speed.  I don't know.  But on this particular occasion, the guy behind me just kept blowing his horn, and something inside me snapped.  After I turned into the drive and was off the road, I jumped out of my car.  I started yelling who knows what at the driver who was now probably 75-100 yards on down the road.  My next thought was “What in the world am I doing?!?”  It's not that I'm a little man – I weigh 210 lbs. - but I'm certainly no fighter.  Thankfully, the car kept going and was out of sight in seconds.

"Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble."

- The three witches in Shakespeare's MacBeth

Both Scripture and personal experience have convinced me that my heart is very much like a bubbling cauldron of filth which usually just simmers so that it looks harmless enough, but when the fire beneath that cauldron is stoked by the right circumstances, like a horn honking at me, then the cauldron boils and up comes some really vile stuff.  The Lord Jesus said, “But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.  For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man” (Matthew 15:18-20a).

I fear what many call sanctification is nothing more than an attempt using various means to keep the temperature on filthy cauldrons (defiled hearts) as low as possible so that the worst of the contents rarely surface.  And while I agree that it's far better to suppress such things as lust, anger, and envy than to allow them full reign, I do not agree that such suppression makes a man holy.  Why?  Because the cauldron (heart) is still putrid.  As Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

So if suppressing the outward manifestations of my sin doesn't make me clean, how is it that I can approach a holy God in prayer without presumption?  Remember Isaiah 59:2 teaches that my iniquities have separated me from my God so that He will not hear.  Not that Jehovah is unaware of what is being asked – He knows all things - but God as God does not grant an audience to the wicked.  Isaiah 59:3 further explains this by saying, “For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue has muttered perverseness.” 

Now upon reading such words, a convinced sinner will undoubtedly be slain.  His conscience will bear witness against him saying, “Thou art the man!” (2 Samuel 12:7).  And like the patriarch Job, he will cry out to God, “Thou writest bitter things against me, and makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth” (Job 13:26).  In other words, he knows that passages like Isaiah 59:3 are describing him.  Nonetheless, he still trembling prays.  But on what basis could such a one have confidence that his prayers are being heard? 

“When thy conscience is thoroughly afraid with the remembrance of thy sins past, and the devil assaileth thee with great violence, going about to overwhelm thee with heaps, floods, and whole seas of sins, to terrify thee, and to draw thee from Christ; then arm thyself with such sentences as these: Christ the Son of God was given, not for the holy, righteous, worthy, and such as were his friends; but for the wicked sinners, for the unworthy, and for his enemies.”  - Martin Luther (as quoted by Edward Fisher in the Marrow of Modern Divinity)

As Isaiah 59:2 makes clear, God as God will not grant an audience to miserable wretches like me.  But in the person of Jesus Christ, the God/man, not only is an audience granted but an invitation extended (Hebrews 4:14-16).  And so it is that I pray in the name of Christ.  But let me be clear - I'm not referring here to simply adding His name as an appendage to my prayers or specifically mentioning His name at all.  Rather, praying in Christ's name is me being conscious that if my prayers are received in heaven, it is only because of Christ's blood shed for sinners.