This morning, as I try to do every Monday morning, I prayed in my morning prayers for people I know and love, and who have a variety of needs. Included in them today were four men I know who, having grown up in evangelical, gospel-centred Christian homes or churches, have made the decision to pursue homosexual relationships or lifestyles.
I pray for these four men quite frequently, moved in part I guess by the knowledge of the brokenness of my own sexuality. My prayers are not from a position of superiority. In fact, this morning as I came to prayer I was quite burdened by that sense of my own brokenness. When I came to the names of these four in my prayer diary, I thought "O Lord, how am I going to pray for them when I am so poor myself?" But I did pray for them, and in the prayer a wonderful strengthening happened to me.
The Spirit of God is for the weak and the broken. There is probably nothing weaker in the world than honest praying. I found in praying today that the Spirit of God came to me in a fresh way, lifting the despondancy and bleakness of the sense of my brokenness, and energising me with knowledge of the grace of the Lord Jesus that will guard me and keep me until the great final day of renovation, renewal, restoration. And with that came a renewed resolve to wait faithfully in weakness, not to let the brokenness be the last word, but to live in Jesus Christ, the Lord of grace.
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2 comments:
A lovely blog, Andrew. I too am learning to pray daily for my friends, enemies and others. The Spirit leads us in our prayers (Rom 8:26). But we first have to make the effort to decide to pray.
Luther comments on the above verse with rare insight:
‘These sighs which are scarcely preceptible to us are what Paul calls the unuttererable crying and sighing which fill heaven and earth . . . It so particularly fills heaven that angels think that they have never heard aught else but this sighing . . . that God himself hears nothing else beside it, and it drowns the sound of everything else.’
A song by Noel Due also captures this reality:
Spirit prays to God in heaven,
Intercedes for glory's sons.
God who knows the hearts of all men,
Hears and heeds the Spirit's groans.
'Abba Father! 'Abba Father!
Fills all earth and sea and sky!
Fills all earth and sea and sky!
(New Creation Hymn Book, #256)
A lovely blog, Andrew. I too am learning to pray daily for my friends, enemies and others. The Spirit leads us in our prayers (Rom 8:26). But we first have to make the effort to decide to pray.
Luther comments on the above verse with rare insight:
‘These sighs which are scarcely preceptible to us are what Paul calls the unuttererable crying and sighing which fill heaven and earth . . . It so particularly fills heaven that angels think that they have never heard aught else but this sighing . . . that God himself hears nothing else beside it, and it drowns the sound of everything else.’
A song by Noel Due also captures this reality:
Spirit prays to God in heaven,
Intercedes for glory's sons.
God who knows the hearts of all men,
Hears and heeds the Spirit's groans.
'Abba Father! 'Abba Father!
Fills all earth and sea and sky!
Fills all earth and sea and sky!
(New Creation Hymn Book, #256)
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