Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 9-10.

When Daniel realized that Jeremiah had prophesied that the Exile would last seventy years, and that seventy years had almost passed, he began to pray.  I was struck today by the part of Daniel’s prayer where he said, “We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. ”  We do not pray and expect God to answer our prayers because of our righteousness.  In fact, as Daniel’s prayer makes clear, we are sinful and deserving of God’s judgement.  We expect God to answer because He has said that He will and because we know that He is merciful.  And even though Daniel expected God to answer his prayer, before he made his request of God he acknowledged that he and the Israelites had sinned and deserved God’s judgement.  We need to follow Daniel’s example and both confess and repent of our sins before we put our petitions before God.  I realized something else as I wrote this.  The phrasing I used about us expecting God to answer us suggests that I think we have the right to expect an answer.  That is not the case.  God is under no obligation to answer our prayers.  God answers our prayers out of His great mercy, not because we deserve those answers.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.