Sunday, July 13, 2008

Prayer for the Fatigued

Perhaps you feel fatigued because you have served the Lord with your whole being, prayerfully and joyfully, and now it's time to rest in Him for a while. Or perhaps, like me, you find yourself fatigued because your service to Him has been too often accompanied by prayer but has not actually been the result of prayer. If you fall into this later camp, perhaps the following prayer may help you as it helped me:

Lord Jesus, whom I follow --
I am sorry, and I repent of my ways,
Which obscure your ways.
I repent of the self-sufficiency so embedded within me -
And of the prayerlessness, restlessness, busyness, and fatigue
That are its consequence.

I repent because I have not honored Your ways by drawing from Your strength.
I repent because I want Your ways to be known in the earth, not my own ways.
And in honesty I acknowledge that I repent because I know that I desperately need the fruits of this repentance.

Please receive me back as Your follower,
Though I have sought to lead the way.
Please deliver me from self-sufficiency and its fruit,
And cause me to know the gladness of service once again.
Whatever I have built with my own hands --
Tear down in Your jealousy
Or redeem in Your mercy
Either way, I praise You, O Lord,
For your gracious forgiveness and cleansing
Because of the shed blood of Calvary.

1 comment:

Elizabeth said...

Ken, thank you for this prayer. What an uplifting reminder of the sufficiency of Christ in every way. There are so many good things to unpack about that prayer, but that would take a whole new blog post (which perhaps I will write one of these days and back-link to this blog). My spirit was encouraged and resonated deeply with these words.