A Prayer

Lord Jesus,

By Your Spirit, You have called us to be Your disciples. You have called us to follow You. We find this to be the greatest blessing imaginable. And our appreciation of Your call grows as we come to understand the alternative to following You. To do that is to follow death. We are grateful that we are Yours and You are ours because of the Gospel.

Lord, when we began this walk with You our understanding of what You require was small, quite small. But now that we've been following You for a while, now that we have been taught by the Spirit using the Scriptures, we understand better what it means to be Your disciples. We have heard You describe Your discipleship. You have said things like, 'whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me', and 'if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me' and 'whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.'

Lord, we want to follow You. We really do. You are the only way to life. We are convinced of that. And yet, what You call for seems beyond us. And, to be honest, there are times when we would rather follow the ways of the world and not submit to Your lordship over us. We know that doing this is terrible. We are not proud of the fact. But it is the truth.

So, we come to You, knowing that You are a gracious Lord. We come confessing our sin, confessing our too often lackluster discipleship. We do repent of this evil, for that’s what it is, evil, and we have no excuse. We ask for Your forgiveness, that, according to Your promises, our sin would be blotted out and forgotten.

But we know that that is not enough. We really do want to follow You in the ways that You have described, in ways that You certainly deserve, but there is so much still within our hearts that gets in the way. So, we also ask that, by Your Spirit, You would make us into the kind of disciples that we ought to be, the kind of disciples that we want to be. Help us to reject the alluring and deadly ways of the world so that we would follow You wholeheartedly.

We ask for these things, Lord, because we want to live for You. We want to make You look as good as You are. We want the world to see what You can do with sinful, broken people like us, making us whole and fully human once again. It is a comfort to us to know that this is exactly what You want to do with us. That gives us hope.

We look forward to how You will continue to change us. We know that this will take time. And we know that this will require some real effort on our part. But we are convinced that the goal is worth it. You are worth it. So, we thank You, Lord Jesus, for being the kind of Lord that You are. Eternity will not provide enough time to praise Your Name. Amen.