Prayer is not always happy—or worshipful. Neither does it always leave us with a feeling of closure, of satisfaction that everything now is okay. Sometimes prayer doesn’t get past the “Lord, I’m sorry” phase. That seems to be one of the messages of Psalm 106. Genuine prayer sometimes will consist of confession.

We pick up today in the midst of Psalm 106. The writer is not identified but is thought to have been a Levite, an unknown priest.

“Who can proclaim the mighty acts of the Lord or fully declare his praise? Blessed are they who maintain justice, who constantly do what is right.”

Who always does right? Not me, and not the anonymous psalmist either. For, after a short entreaty for God to help him enter the community of praise, the writer confesses, “We have sinned, even as our Fathers did.”

In our culture we rarely think of ourselves as part of community. We are individualists. After all, we’re Texans. Our most admired heroes are pioneers, the Lone Ranger, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston. Even our professions of faith are rarely couched in community. Jesus, my Savior, knocks on the door of my heart. We all have personal relationships with Christ.

From what I know of the Jews, this is not how they saw themselves. Jews saw themselves as a nation. As the nation went, so did the fortunes of individual Jews. Repentance and worship were national events. So it may be hard for us to relate. But consistent with his culture, the psalmist priest here identifies his own sin with those of his country, Israel.

Psalm 106 shows us that confession is an honest form of prayer. It’s appropriate for us to pray for our nation, confess our materialism, the way we treat the environment, the economic greed of our investors, our insensitivity to the breakdown of our communities. More than we care to admit, like the Jews, we’re all in this together.

We need to pray for our church, to confess when we fail to consistently share the gospel, to minister to the poor, and to love one another.

And we need to confess our personal sins. We need to confess our failure to be the neighbors we should be, confess when we covet things and when we let God slide to second, third, or tenth on our priority list.

Read Psalm 106 and compose your own confession to God. It may not be the most fun prayer you’ve ever prayed. But it is a prayer that God longs to hear. And it’s a prayer that He will honor, so we can all say, “Praise be to the Lord, the God of our nation, forever and ever. Amen. Praise the Lord.”