LORD God, King of the Universe,
We come before you in prayer to praise you, to honour your name, to join with angels in adoring you. We call you holy, holy, holy — The LORD God Almighty, with all the church, not only in every nation and every language, but across every time in history. We remember your faithfulness, your power to save, your love for the unlovely, and join in worship with Abraham, David, all the prophets, the apostles, the first converts in Jerusalem, and every believer since, because Jesus tells us: you are the God of the living and all your faithful are alive in you.
LORD God, King of the Universe,
We participate in eternity when we kneel before you in prayer. You are our creator, our sustainer, our judge. So how do we approach you? How should we know you?
By Jesus’ own teaching you reveal yourself to us: you are the shepherd who not only goes to rescue the lost, bewildered sheep, but carries it home on his shoulders — just so you bear the weight of the wayward soul, expending yourself, and not begrudgingly, not impatiently, but with such joy, you want all of heaven to rejoice with you.
You are the housewife who scours the world in search of the lost, who brings light to every dark corner. No crevice is too filthy or obscure for you, and by Jesus’ invitation, we dare to imagine you on your knees in the dust and dirt, peering into and under and behind every obstacle to find your lost treasure.
Above all, you are the Father of great wealth and power and prestige who never stops loving his children, though one of them is disgraceful, the other cold and bitter, and both of them fail to know how deeply, wildly and graciously they are loved. How, in fact, we are loved.
Father, though you are mighty, you show yourself humble in loving us. Your passion for us is beyond all commonsense, yet in Jesus’ name, we are glad to be found by you, grateful to be carried home, to come into the light, to have our sins forgiven, and hear Jesus himself call us his glory.
We thank you for the lives now set before us — for the freedom of having a living hope, and for the privilege of being fellow workers with Christ, to continue his building in every nation and language and time.
We pray that you would awake us to our high calling: to be light in the darkness, messengers of your gospel, to bring your great, unswerving love into every crooked place.
We pray that Jesus’ own humility and compassion might shine in us so that through us the world might know you as we do — as our unfailing Father, forever and ever,
Amen.
— prayed at Abbotsford Presbyterian Church on Sunday 31 January 2016.
Rowan McAuley 