Hearing Our Prayers

Psalm 66:17-20  I cried out to him with my mouth; his praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened; but God has surely listened and heard my voice in prayer. Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me!

We can have confidence that God hears our prayers.

The first part of this passage really intrigued me.  Here the author of the psalm states that if one cherishes sin in their heart, that God will not listen when they cry out to Him.  I did some further study into this text, and found something that seemed to clarify things in my mind.  The word that the NIV translated into "cherish" has the a lot to do with seeing.  In fact, the definition given is "to see, look at, inspect, perceive, consider".  So a possible alternate translation could be "if I saw sin in my heart . . ." Now, don't think that I'm getting soft on sin or anything like that, but I think that there may be more to this, especially because of the "but" that follows that statement. It says that God did listen to their prayer, and there is no mention of the sin disappearing.

Many people, myself included, can fall into the trap of seeing themselves as so sinful that it is pointless even to pray.  We have heard many times on how much God hates sin, and think that because we are soaked in the stuff that God hates us as well. Now we may not explicitly say or think that, but the thought could definitely be lurking somewhere in the back of our minds.  We can lose sight of the fact that although God hates sin, He loves the sinner, and will not withhold His love from us regardless of how bad we think ourselves to be.  That, my friend, is definitely a reason to say "Praise be to God!"