DAILY PRAYER (BY SPURGEON)
O you who are the King of kings and Lord of lords, we worship you. “Before the Lord’s awesome throne, we bow with sacred joy. We can truly say that we delight in God. There was a time when we feared you, O God, with the fear of bondage. But now, we revere and love you equally.
The thought of your omnipresence was once dreadful to us. We wondered, “Where shall we flee from Your presence?” and it seemed to make hell itself more horrifying, as we heard the voice saying, “If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.” But now, O Lord, we desire to find you. Our longing is to feel your presence, and it is the heaven of heavens to know that you are there. The sickbed is soft when you are there. The furnace of affliction grows cool when you are there, and the house of prayer, when you are present, is none other than the house of God and the very gate of heaven.
Amen.
VERSE OF THE DAY (COMMENTARY BY SPURGEON)
“I have revealed your name to the people you gave me from the world. They were yours, you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.” (John 17:6)
How tenderly he speaks of them! He speaks the best he can about them. They were imperfect, feeble people, yet he says, “They have kept your word.” And indeed, they did. May you and I do the same and not be swept away by the tide of unbelief! Even if we are not perfect and fall short in some aspects, may the Master be able to say to God about us, “They have kept your word!”
RECOMMENDED RESOURCE
Should we use pre-written prayers?*
We don’t want to merely go through the motions of prayer — we need to have deep, passionate, heartfelt communication with the living God. Prayer that engages our hearts, fills our minds, and fuels our lives of love for God and others.
Some people think that using a book of pre-written prayers is incompatible with this kind of passionate prayer life.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Using pre-written prayers can actually lift your prayer life out of a rut (praying the same words about the same issues), giving us new things to pray for, biblical language to pray with, and different attributes of God to reflect on in prayer.
Praying with the Fount of Heaven book has really fueled my prayer life this month, and I know it will fuel your prayer life as well.
This book compiles hundreds of prayers from the early church, so you can pray along with heroes who lived within just a few generations of Jesus’ ministry.
Pray with passion, with all of your heart.
Pray with the church, with all of history.