DAILY PRAYER (BY SPURGEON)
Help us to love you with all our heart and soul and mind. Enable us also to live to our fellow men according to your word, loving our neighbor as ourselves. Save us from all unneighborly tempers, all hard thoughts, all slanderous words. Deliver us from bearing any anger in our heart: save us from everything that is ungenerous or unkind, and let the law of love be written on the fleshy tablets of our renewed heart, and be carried out in all the thoughts and words and acts of our lives.
Especially help us to master our tongue; for if that be bridled the whole body will be manageable. Keep us, O God, when we are in company, and equally preserve us when we are in secret. Help us to keep the door of our lips; and grant that when that door is opened there may not come out of it sweet water and bitter: may we not both bless and curse, but may we speak that which is good to edification, and may our speech be also seasoned with salt.
Amen.
VERSE OF THE DAY (COMMENTARY BY SPURGEON)
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” (Matthew 22:37–40)
The teaching of Moses and all the prophets might be summarized in “these two commandments.” The duty of loving God and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves is the supreme subject of the divine revelation.
On this, as on a great peg, “hang all the law and the prophets.” Remove the peg, and what have you left as a support for the teaching given by the Lord through the holy men of old who wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost?
RECOMMENDED RESOURCE
How does God’s love relate to his wrath? If God is love why do bad things happen?
Today we prayed that God would help us to love others as he has loved us. We know that this is a clear command of Scripture (see, for example, the verse of the day), but do we really understand it? In order to love others the way that God has loved us, we have to understand how God has loved us. We have to have a firm, rooted confidence that God really does love us.
Grappling with questions like “If God is love why do bad things happen?” can increase your amazement at the wonders of God’s love. And so wrestling through those questions is important.
One great resource for helping you tackle those questions is The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God by D.A. Carson. This short book explains God’s love in a thoroughly biblical way that will leave you amazed at God’s grace and more eager to love others.
I hope you’ll grab a copy and read it this summer.