Father,
You are our God, and
You have done us so much good. Our blessings abound. And the greatest of these
blessings is that You have rescued us from our sinfulness and adopted us into
Your family as Your children. Eternity will not be long enough for us to express
how grateful we are for this. You are our very good God.
And yet, Father,
life here is not perfect. Actually, it is far from perfect. We don't want to
complain against You, against Your wisdom or against Your love. But as the
psalmists do, we want to complain to You. We want to offer up to You our
lament.
Father, as we look
around us, we see so much that is just wrong. Throughout this globe, there are
wars and diseases and disasters. And so many are simply wasting their lives.
They pursue things that cannot give life but rather only death. In all of this,
we can see that sin is quite powerful, though most don't understand this.
And it's not just
what's going on around us. Each of us here has his own list of issues. We've
all tasted disappointment, sometimes severe disappointment. Even now, we face
some things that just confuse us as we try to live well. Who has no struggles?
This is not a
complaint against You, Father. We don't want to do that because we understand
the foolishness of doing such a thing. But we do want to appeal to You as our
Father. So, we ask for Your Spirit to do His redemptive work among us. There
are life skills that we lack, skills that would make our lives work better. We
ask that He would teach them to us. We acknowledge that this will likely
require our repentance. But if that will result in doing a better job of living
well for Your sake, we are ready for the Spirit point out our sin that we may
admit it to You and to ourselves. That way we can begin the work of putting it
to death. We want to grow as holy people so that we can do better at being
faithful people.
We realize that
there will be many things about this life that will not change. Sin has done
its work very well. So, we ask for the grace to endure, to patiently endure,
the pains of living in a fallen world. But along with that we pray for an end
of those pains. We pray for Jesus to return. And we ask for this because we
know that that is when all the wars, diseases and disasters will be gone, along
with all the struggles and disappointments and confusion. So, with the Apostle
John we also say, 'Come, Lord Jesus'.
We thank You,
Father, that we can be honest with You. And we thank You that You will respond
to our prayer the way You always respond, with wisdom and love as we pray this
through Christ our Lord, Amen.