My Prayer For You Today

Today it is my privilege to go to God’s throne on behalf of the reader.  This prayer is for you and I hope you will know that I mean it as exactly that.  It is not posted here to be dissected or even appreciated – it is written with the intent that God will fulfill it on your behalf.  May you trust Him today for its answer in your life. – Jeff

“Moreover as for me, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you…” – 1 Samuel 12:23

Heavenly Father, I praise You today for being constantly faithful, amazingly kind and compassionate, thoroughly good, and purposefully active.  You are gentle in your authority over your children.  You are steadfast and reliable.  You stun us when we remember that You always know what You are doing, and that what You are doing is always good.  Forgive us for trying to coach You.  Forgive us for wishing You would do things our way, according to our limited wisdom.  Forgive us for our petulancy and pouting when You have empowered us to be strong and courageous.  Have mercy upon us in our fears and anxieties, and enable us to place ourselves in our ranks beneath Your guiding and gracious hand.  Tell us Your secrets, O God.  Speak in such a fashion that we may undeniably hear You.  If we have grieved You, Holy Spirit, by our apathy and indulgence, then please renew a right spirit within us so that we may again taste Your most precious joys.  Cause our ears to be open to Your words of promise.  Cause our hearts to be satisfied fully in that we are fed and clothed and sheltered today.  Give us eyes to look upon those whose needs are greater than ours, and forbid us from stopping at the point of feeling pity for them – place it in our hearts and hands to help them.  Let us be used by You to remind them of their Father’s faithful provision.

Give us hearts which treasure the Kingdom above anything else.  Cause us to gag when this world presents itself as a meal which would suffice us.  Let us be starved from the empty pledges of our fallen culture, and let us feast on the glorious provisions in Your Gospel of Grace.  Let us remember Your mercy, compassion, guidance, renewing, chastisement, relentless pursuit, coming Kingdom-climax and Your inevitable paradise.  Cause us to slow down and reacquaint ourselves with the treasured reality that we will one day be evacuated from this fallen world, and be allowed to enter into the final rest which carries ceaseless echoes of ecstasy and glory.  Help us remember that there are sights unseen, songs yet unheard, visions not yet beheld which await us in Heaven.  Constantly remind us that there is more that we have not yet experienced than that which we have – convince us again that the best is yet to come.  Teach us precisely and personally that eye has not yet seen the things which you have prepared for us, and that there will likely be a stunned silence from Your saints as we enter into the fullness of our inheritance.  Let our present diseases, deprivations, denials and delays be humbly understood in the perspective of an eventual deliverance.  Empower us afresh to love those who oppose and wound us.  We hate our bitterness, and would ask you to remove it from us, and to supply us with new hearts that are eager to love, forgive and serve.  Let us pursue others in the grace, mercy and forgiveness of Jesus Christ.  Protect us from Satan and his frenzied host who would kill us today if You allowed it.  Let them tremble at You in us rather than us trembling at them in this world.  Because we are overcomers and hyper-conquerors, let us then live in that reality – Jesus, help us here because we do not always sense within us the victory that You say we possess!  May all stubborn strongholds be seen as crumbling.  May every thought and imagination of our heart that exalts itself against You be immediately reduced to rubble.  May an empty tomb reality begin to characterize this vapor of a life which You have entrusted to us.

Make us holy, O Father.  Let us be willing to pay the price for this necessity in us.  Let us choose joy in a world that affords us little.  Teach us the power of silence and reverence so that we might sense the most subtle of moves of the Holy Spirit.  Cause us to be patient and, in this patience, let us possess our souls.  Adjust our appetites heavenward.  Plow new furrows in our hearts and plant the choicest of seed that we can be entrusted with.  Let there be an amazing harvest so that all around us will be reminded that our mighty God has not waned in His power.  Show Yourself strong –not so that we might believe. . . But because we already do.

In the majestic and strong name of the Jesus, Amen.