O Lord God, the great I AM, we do confess and cheerfully acknowledge that all comes from you. You have made us and not we ourselves, and the breath in our nostrils is kept there by your continued power. We owe our sustenance, our happiness, our advancement, our ripening, our very existence entirely unto you. We would bless you for all the mercies with which you surround us, for all things which our eyes see that are pleasant, which our ears hear that are agreeable, and for everything that makes existence to be life.
Especially do we own this dependence when we come to deal with spiritual things. O God, we are less than nothing in the spiritual world. We do feel this growingly, and yet even to feel this is beyond our power. Your grace must give us even to know our need of grace. We are not willing to confess our own sinfulness until you show it to us. Though it stares us in the face, our pride denies it, and our own inability is unperceived by us. We steal your power and call it our own until you compel us to say that we have no strength in ourselves.
Thank you for bringing Surgeon’s richness of Christian spirituality to us daily. His experiential insights are a feast in the awesomeness of our God.