Derek Prince - Confession, An Essential Part of Effective Payer
This is an excerpt from: How To Pray For Israel
The third suggestion I have applies both to Jews and to Gentiles. It is confess your sins against one another to the Lord. You see, the true intercessor is one who has come to confess sin before the Lord. The perfect pattern of this is Daniel. Daniel was one of the most righteous men recorded in the Old Testament. In fact, there are two major characters in the Old Testament of whom no sin is recorded. One is Joseph, the other is Daniel. But when Daniel saw that the time had come to pray for the restoration of his people to Jerusalem, he came before the Lord in prayer. Though he was an outstandingly righteous man, he identified himself with the sins of his people. You see, if you're going to be an intercessor you cannot stand there and say, "They have done wrong". That doesn't get you anywhere with God. You have to say, "We have done wrong".
You have to identify yourself with the sins of your family, your inheritance, your culture, your nation, whatever it is you're praying for. Let me say to you dear Americans, there are plenty of sins in the history of America with which to identify. When you've dealt with the sins against the blacks, then move on to the sins against the Indians which have hardly been touched on by most Christians. But now let's look at the pattern of Daniel in regard to Israel. He says (I'm just reading from Daniel 9 from a few verses, from verse 5) We have sinned... Not they have sinned, but we have sinned and committed iniquity. We have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from your precepts and your judgments.
Is that true of Israel? It certainly is. Neither have we heeded your servants the prophets who spoke in your name to our kings and our princes, to our fathers and all the people of the land. O Lord, righteousness belongs to you, but to us shame of face as it is this day. To the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, those near and those far off, in all the countries to which you have driven them, because of the unfaithfulness which they have committed against you. O Lord, to us belong shame of face, to our kings, our princes and our fathers, because we have sinned against you. To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against you. We have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in His laws which He set before us by His servants the prophets. Yes, all Israel has transgressed your law and has departed so as not to obey your voice. Therefore the curse and the oath written in the Law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out upon us because we have sinned against Him.
We could continue but you see the pattern? Don't be self-righteous; don't stand at a distance like the Pharisee in the temple who said, "I am not as this Publican. I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all I possess". The Publican, the tax collector, said, "Lord, be merciful to me a sinner". Jesus said the Publican went to his house justified, the Pharisee didn't. Pharisaical prayers are abominations to the Lord. Right now, let me just relate something that happened this past June. I was a speaker at a conference in Jerusalem of the ICCC.
Do you know what the ICCC is? It's hard to get all the C's right. It's the International Christian Chamber of Commerce. It's a group of international businessmen who have decided to commit their businesses and their expertise to promoting the Kingdom of God. They're not living for profit, they're living for God. It's international. It's headed by a Swede, and there are Germans and there are British, and there are French, and there are others. A branch has just recently opened here in the United States. They decided this past June to hold their international conference in Jerusalem.
One of the things they did was to contact a number of Jewish businessmen in Israel and say, "Listen, is there any way that we can get together and by working together promote the products of Israel overseas"? Believe me, that excited the Jewish people. They don't have many people that approach them like that. Anyhow, it so happened I was the speaker on the final evening and my theme was "The life of Jacob as a pattern for what's going to happen to Israel". I explained how when God told Jacob after about 14 or 15 years time had come to go back to his land and his inheritance, he set out with his wives and his eleven children and all his possessions. He got as far as the stream that is the border of Israel on the east and he received news that his brother Esau was coming to meet him with 400 armed men.
The last time they'd been together, Esau had been trying to murder Jacob. So he became a little anxious. That night a mysterious stranger met him, a man wrestled with him all night. But the next day he said, "I have seen God face to face". And at the end of his life when he was blessing the two sons of Joseph he said, "God, the angel who redeemed me from all evil". So that one person was a man, God; and an angel, a messenger from God to man. This is very vivid to me because I encountered the same person the night I got saved. And so this has always been clear to me. There's only one person in the universe that answers to that description, a man and God, and a messenger from God to man, the one who was manifested in human history as Jesus of Nazareth. My theme was the Jewish people will never gain real possession of their land and be secure there until they've met that person. He's there waiting to meet them.
Well, Jacob resolved his problem with the angel but he had to meet one other person, his brother Esau. I personally believe if Jacob hadn't met the angel he would never have acted the way he did. But when he saw his brother Esau coming, he bowed to the ground seven times before him. He humbled himself before his brother. I suggested to those people Jacob could be viewed as a pattern of the Jews, Esau as a pattern of the Gentiles. I said at some time there has to be a reconciliation and a self-humbling by both Jews and Gentiles. And, at the end I did something unrehearsed. I said, "Perhaps the Lord wants to see a little of that here tonight". So I said, "If there are two Jewish believers and two Gentile Christians who would like to confess their sins one to another..."
Well, before I finished speaking two young Jewish believers, both of whom were friends of mine, stood up and began to come. And then the two men who were directing the conference, Gentiles, came up. I stood back and they stood facing one another just in front of the podium. This must have lasted half an hour. They really confessed their sins against the others to the others. The Britisher confessed of how Britain had mishandled the mandate for Israel and had been unfaithful to their commitment. What was interesting, because I had happened to say by way of, just in passing that contempt is one of the greatest wounds you can give a person. The two young Jewish men both confessed the Jewish contempt for Gentiles. Then they did everything, they bowed down, knelt down before one another and actually kissed one another's shoes. It was totally unplanned by me. Ruth is correcting me, they had taken their shoes off.
Well, it was something of a breakthrough in the congregation at that point. People started to weep, a lot of people took their shoes off, and something went through the congregation. I think this is a pattern. The Jews have got to confess their sins against the Gentiles. They're not sins of persecution but they are sins of contempt. And the Gentiles have plenty of sins to confess against the Jews. I doubt whether intercession will be fully effective until the problem of unconfessed sin has been dealt with. We have learned a principle which has been learned by many intercessors, that you need to confess the sins of the group you represent. You've got to stand in proxy just as Daniel did because he was a righteous man but he didn't say of his fellow Jews, "They have sinned," he said, "We have sinned". It seems to me it was Daniel's prayer was what opened the way for the return of the Jews from Babylon to Israel. Confession is an essential part of effective intercession.