Prayer VII
With lowly love, and loving trust, and trustful obedience, we would come to Thee now, O Lord. With Thee is the fountain of life. All our seeing is by Thy light, and all our joys are in the drinking of the river of Thy pleasures. Help us, we beseech Thee, drawn by Thy grace, and driven by our sins, and knit into such close communion with Thyself, that there may flow into our hearts the life, the light, the joy, which Thou dost mean us to possess. We acknowledge that we, by our own faults, have been dead in trespasses and sins. We acknowledge that we have loved darkness more than the light of life. We acknowledge that we have sought, and in some partial measure found, our joys elsewhere than in Thee. And we come to Thee now, not without some sense of our follies, and beseech Thee that Thou wouldst deliver us from the snares of falsely fixed desires, and wouldst keep us from the folly of seeking in the world for what it can never give, and wouldst stir us up that we may take hold upon Thee, and laying hold of Thee may find that we have Thee for our very own.
O Lord, whether we know it or not, and we often do not know it, our heart and our flesh crieth out for the living God. We beseech Thee that we may turn these cries into prayers, and that they may be the prayers of faith, and that they may be seconded and backed up by our daily lives, and that so we may receive that without which we shall continue always to be miserable and poor and blind and naked, and all the while conceiting ourselves to have need of nothing. O Lord! teach us our great wants, and then give us Thy great gifts, and fill us with the power and the peace of Thine own life bestowed through Jesus Christ Who is our Life. And help us, day by day, to live the lives that we live in the flesh by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved us and gave Himself for us.
Do Thou, we beseech Thee, pour out upon this congregation the blessing of Thy good Spirit, that its divine influences may move upon all our minds and hearts and wills; and that whether we hear or speak the word of the Lord may to us be mighty as the hammer that breaks the rock in pieces, gentle as the rain upon the mown grass, and full of blessing as it only can be.
We pray Thee to help us in our worship, to guide our thoughts when we meditate upon Thy truth, to keep us from wandering away in mind and imagination and fancy into the ordinary affairs of life with all its trivialities and its trials. Help us as we draw near to Thee in worship, and as we open our minds and hearts to the teaching of Thy truth. Grant that our meeting may be full of blessing and of lasting good for every one of us. We would come to Thee with humble thanksgiving for all Thy great mercies to us, and for Him Who is the sun of them all, and in Whom all the sweets of Thy giving lie compacted, even Jesus Christ our Saviour.
We beseech Thee to receive our acknowledgments; we pray that they may become more adequate and more operative in our lives, so that to us all the service shall be an honour, and all that the Lord lays upon us shall be a joy to accept and to do. Forgive our many sins, cleanse our hearts from their manifold evils, deliver us from all our errors, lead us into the full truth. May we live by the truth that we know, and be ever growing in the grace and in the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour. Hear us in our prayer, and in Thy great mercy forgive and accept us, through Christ our Lord.