Sunday, June 10, 2018

A Prayer

Father,

It is so good to know that You have created a religion of grace. It's not complicated. All we need do is trust You, trust Your promises. And that's true whether we're talking about Your promise of eternal salvation or Your promise to carry our anxieties as we face an extra busy day. You are a God of such glorious grace. All we need to do to enjoy this grace is trust You.

And yet, we have such a hard time with this. To simply trust You to do what needs doing seems too easy at times. There has to be more to it than that. There has to be some effort on our part, something that we need to do, some work to be done so that we can show ourselves worthy - or something like that.

Then, there are times when we know what You offer, that all that is needed is trust, but we just don't. We don't want to give up control. That feels too scary. And so, we continue to believe that we can depend upon ourselves to deal with life.

Father, in our saner moments we know that all of this is foolish. But what's worse, it's evil. How can it not be evil to say to You, 'I don't trust You'? And that is what we are saying when we hold on to our anxieties, when we hold on to our demand to present ourselves as worthy, when we to hold on to the myth that we can do life on our own.

So, first of all, Father, we humbly repent of our insulting sin. We have no excuse. It's just wrong. We ask that You would forgive us because of Jesus. But we know that forgiveness isn't enough. So, we also ask, Father, that You would change us by Your Spirit. Change us so that we would do better at trusting You.

Father, we need Your help so that we would do better at believing in Your religion of grace. Doing better at this would certainly be good for us. It would be living according to reality. But more than that, it would be good for You. We would be able to live in a way that makes You look good, to live in a way that would make Your grace for sinners shine. So, please make us believe in Your grace. We know that this is not asking too much because You are the God of grace who has made astounding promises to us. Through Christ, our Lord, Amen.

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