Father,
When we pray, you listen to us and answer, but you often require us to be patient and continue to ask while we wait. When we are greatly in need of help we can be tempted to appeal to those who seem powerful, but are arrogant and manipulative. But you bless the one who trusts you and waits patiently.
Then when you do answer and bring us out of some trouble and into a new season of security, you give us new ways to talk about your great work in our lives and a kind of insight that isn't learned from a book. As we express our thankfulness among our brothers and sisters, they are drawn to trust you more and so your glory spreads. We too easily speak about things we should keep silent about, and keep silent about your deliverance and great work that we should be talking about endlessly. Help us to speak about your faithfulness and salvation and love for us in this church.
Please help us to use our words well. You gave us our mouths to use for all kinds of good. Sometimes we shut our lips too tightly and incubate sin in our inner person. If we spoke out of the overflow of our hearts, our sin would be revealed and we would be soon corrected by a brother or sister and convicted and brought to repentance. But instead we can hide behind the seeming wisdom of silence and maintain a mind infected by evil thoughts. Give us humility. Inflame our desire to be godly far beyond our desire to seem godly.
We further sin with our silence by seeing one another do what is contrary to your command and saying nothing about it. We fear the response and not without some reason. Put courage into our love. Give us such a passion for each other's holiness that will easily bear discomfort.
When I consider what is going on in the world I am confused and disturbed. Inflation threatens our finances, new laws threaten freedom, war threatens supplies, bizarre ideologies threaten our children, and markets threaten housing. Even more disconcerting is that the powers that have stirred up this modern situation do not know you and do not submit to your law, even in pretense. All the things that support our life seem in danger of being shaken.
I have had enough of thinking about it. You are the upholder of my life. Lies may be pumped onto every screen, but your Spirit teaches us in the inner person. Everything may be ridiculously expensive, but you have never failed to provide our daily bread. Sometimes it seems like all the powers of the world are assembled against you and thus against us, but you laugh at them.
Let the situation of our lives drive us to loosen our attachments to things that can be lost and pursue all the harder the things that cannot be taken away. Keep us from saying, "What will I eat? What will I wear? Where will I sleep?". You know we need those things and for thousands of years your saints have testified that you provide them. Instead, orient our pursuits to things above. Teach us the secret of contentment. Make us more concerned about the state of our souls than that of our bodies. Help us to think more about being unstained by the world than how to survive in the world. Help us to think more about how to love one another today than how to store up provisions for ourselves for tomorrow. Help us to have such trust in your faithfulness, such confidence in your love, such hope for the future, such an experience of a cleansed conscience, such joy in fellowship with you, that the news we hear will not disturb our peace.
As we seek godliness, do sustain us with the things we need. If you choose to send us few dollars, provide for us directly as if we were fed by ravens so that we might see all the more clearly that we are in your care.
Please bless our service this morning. May you be pleased with our worship. Please bring conviction and encouragement to the hearts of your people as each has need.