Lord God, You have created us in Your image, to reflect You in the world and ultimately bring about Your glory and praise and worth. And yet because of our sin, we have marred and distorted that image so greatly, we fall short of Your glory daily and are subject to Your wise justice and resulting judgment for how we have turned from You and treat our fellow humans. For all the ways we’ve fallen short, have mercy upon us, as we know You are ready and willing to do. Thank You Jesus for Your perfect law keeping in our behalf, Your sacrifice on the cross in our place and Your glorious resurrection for us, that we would behold Your face in glory forever and be satisfied for all eternity.
Category: Prayer
Father, some of us come here from a place of real joy and closeness with You. Many if not most of us are a mixed bag of closeness to You as well as internal and external struggles that weigh and press in on us. And some of us are merely struggling to hang on. Lord for all of us though, there are real points of struggle to believe what You’ve promised, to believe that You’re good to us. Wherever we are Lord, we pray that You would kindle our hearts with the fire of faith by Your Spirit to fight against our tendency to unbelief. Would we not neglect our pursuit of You, knowing that as we patiently pursue You, You promise to reward those who seek after You. As 1 John 3:2 says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” Father, knowing that’s true in the end, would you at a very fundamental level simply show us Jesus in Your Word in greater ways now? Would we be captivated by what we see of Jesus, His glorious power and justice, as well as His tenderness and kindness and mercy, and would this melt our cold hearts that ebb and flow in struggle to believe what you’ve promised? You know our frame and remember that we are dust. We’re desperate for Your sustaining grace in this and pray to this end.
Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (BCP)
Father, apart from Jesus and the work of Your Holy Spirit in our salvation, we can do nothing. In our natural, sinful state apart from Your intervention, we can’t lift a finger to perform some work or make a step toward You in righteousness. In fact we are opposed to You. We are unholy, depraved, and sinful beyond what we can even understand as Romans 3 makes clear, to the point that even our wills need Your life-giving touch.
You are the God who gives food to the hungry and in Jesus you miraculously fed the five thousand from very little. You LORD set the prisoners free and in Jesus You freed the man from the legion of Demons and the self-destruction inflicted; You LORD open the eyes of the blind, and in Jesus you said the word to many who were blind and immediately they received their sight. You LORD lift up those who are bowed down and in Jesus You greatly blessed and upheld a prostitute who washed Your feet with her tears and hair in remorse and repentance and love For Christ; You LORD love the righteous. You LORD watch over the sojourners and those without a home; You uphold the widow and the fatherless, the abused, the broken, the chastised, all those who suffer deeply, but the way of the wicked You bring to ruin. The prideful, haughty, evil, and self-sufficient You oppose.
Lord Jesus, just as You healed the daughter of Jairus right after healing a woman with an incurable medical condition, you Lord are demonstrated to be the God of healing not just physical conditions, but the God of healing souls. Lord our state apart from the touch of Your healing grace in our souls is incurable. We’re terminal. Apart from a correction of grace, we don’t want You, we don’t seek You, we’re indifferent to You and Your calls to come to You, we’re comfortable in our soul diseases and sins that eat away at us. We’re comfortable in the distractions of the flesh that all too easily please us that are all around us and pressing in and keep us from enjoying the only One who could deeply satisfy all of our desires and longings.
A prayer based on themes from this article at the Gospel Coalition.
Father for all the ways we fall short of Your glory, we pray for forgiveness and know that You are always ready and willing to accept us when we turn. But we pray even further Lord for our hearts that we would be a people who are truly repentant and ready to turn from our sin. And we pray not just that we would merely turn from it, but that we would embrace Christ in the place of it because apart from You we can do nothing and will merely fall back into our sin.
Father for all the ways we fall short of Your glory, we pray for forgiveness and know that You are always ready and willing to accept us when we turn. But we pray even further Lord for our hearts that we would be a people who are truly repentant and ready to turn from our sin. And we pray not just that we would merely turn from it, but that we would embrace Christ in the place of it because apart from You we can do nothing and will merely fall back into our sin.
Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love, that he may deliver their soul from death and keep them alive in famine. – Psalm 33:18-19
Father we rejoice in the fact that you have your eye on us, those who rest in your faithfulness and love toward us. Despite our ongoing sinful condition, we thank you that you will not leave us to our sin but will move heaven and earth to be near us and demonstrated that so clearly and effectively through blood of your son. Deliver us from our sin, deliver us from those things of the world that keep us from deeper fellowship with you. During the present state of the world would you sustain and keep our hearts alive and on fire with love for you even as we find ourselves in a famine of sorts. Draw near to us even as we draw near to you.
“O LORD my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.” | Psalm 30:2
Father we are those whom You have drawn up from the grave, whom you’ve healed, restored, forgiven, made Your very children. You have achieved the absolute impossible task of actually regenerating our hearts, softening them by Your Spirit, making them aware of the indwelling sin that keeps us from You and turning them from that sin to the greatness and glory and power and majesty of who You are, melting them by the very sight of You. Would we not become indifferent and complacent to the wonder and miracle it is that we have been made your own, adopted into Your family, transferred from the domain of darkness and brought into the kingdom of your marvelous light. Our identity lies in You, not in our possessions, not in our status, not in our comfort or where we live or what we do or who our friends are. We are yours and You are ours through faith Lord. Would you help us together as a church to believe what is already true about us: justified by faith, counted with the same righteousness that You posses, as a gift. Would you help us Lord in our temptation to despair during this strange time that You are sovereignly over, that we would press into this time with You while at home alone, with our kids, with our spouses to dig up the treasure of Scripture, to meditate upon Your presence with us and let Your grace soak into us like a dry sponge in water. Though Lord in many ways we do mourn the things we’ve lost and it is right to do so in so many aspects, Lord I ask that we wouldn’t stay there but that we would continue to use this time as an opportunity to seek the joy that surpasses understanding and comprehension to the world around us. Would we be a people marked by joy, by thanksgiving as we’ll hear about today from Psalm 30. Father, work in us a gratitude for all that we’ve been given by You both now and for all eternity and would we not wrongly crave the things we don’t have. We ask for contentment, a contentment that can only come from You. May we rest in you like a resting infant in her mother’s arms. Would You grant that to us as a gift to lighten the burdens we carry day in and day out, knowing that You love to give good gifts to Your children?
And now Lord we pray this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer for this Fourth Sunday of Pentecost:
Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.