[On Tuesdays this year I plan to focus the prayer on praying for our nation and world.]
God of Love,
As I write this I am mindful of all those who do not know your love. Maybe they have never heard the Good News, so they can’t believe or call on You. Maybe their hearts are so hardened they cannot see or hear You and You cannot heal them. Maybe they have chosen to follow a path of darkness instead of your Light that leads to Abundant Life. Today we pray for all those who do not know your love. We pray that people who know and demonstrate your love would be present in their lives. We pray that your Good News would be shared with them. We pray that if you need to break them of darkness, you would do it fully, but as gently as possible, with the intent of bringing healing to them. Help them to surrender to you so they can be fully alive and fully loved. May your Love and Light overcome all the hate, madness, cruelty, anger, and darkness in this world. We ask in the strong name of Christ, Amen.
“How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” (Romans 10:14 NIV)
“‘Go to this people and say,
“You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.”
For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’” (Acts 28:26-28 NIV)
“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”(John 8:12 NIV)
| We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it. From The Four Loves |
| If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving—the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being.From The Problem of Pain Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis |