Sunday, April 29, 2018

A Prayer

Father,
There are many things about You that we don't know. And while there are some things about You that we will never know, there are some things about You that would be good for us to know.

We know that You are a holy God. But there really is a lot about that that we don't understand very well.

It’s so easy to think about Your holiness merely in terms of Your attitude toward sin. But Your holiness is also about Your love. Your love is a holy love. So, it is a pure love. There is nothing that spoils it or taints it or limits it. We get Your love full strength, all the time.

The same is true of Your grace. It is pure grace. When You grant that grace to us there is nothing there that softens it or tones it down. It is always a life-transforming grace.

Father, understanding this about You is such a comfort to us. Who else loves us so purely? Who else is so completely gracious to us?

We want to thank You that You act in these ways to us. We want to praise You for being this kind of God, a holy God.

But it is true that, because of Your holiness, You hate sin. We all acknowledge this, but living it is another thing. Father, if we really understood how much You hate sin, we would hate it more than we do. We would hate our own sin more and work harder to put it to death. We would hate sin wherever it would show up in the world around us.

And if we could understand better how much You hate sin, it would make such a difference in how we survey the wondrous Cross.

Jesus experienced Your holy hatred of sin, Your holy hatred of our sin. If we could understand that better we would be confronted by a question. Who would do that for me?

Father, we need to grow in our knowledge of who You are, of what kind of God You are. It’s too easy to settle for a knowledge that seems good enough. Don’t let that happen to us. Teach us, Father. Teach us more about who You are. Teach us more about what it means that You are the holy God. Teach us so that we will live in a way that reveals the beauty of who You to our world, something that will draw many to You. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.

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