Sunday, March 31, 2019

A Prayer

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.